Who is old enough to remember Y2K? I remember it well (translation: i’m old).

Y2K is an acronym for “Year 2000,” or, as it was also known – “The Year 2000 problem, the Y2K problem, the Millennium bug, the Y2K bug, or simply Y2K.” (source) It was the moment when the clocks struck 12:00 AM on Janury 1, 2000 and how it might affect every aspect of our lives. Why?

The year 2000 was a problem for many computers because many computer programs stored years using only the last two digits of the year; for example, 1980 was stored as “80”, the year 1999 was stored as “99” and the year 2000 would be stored as “00”.

Do you see the problem? Not only did such systems view the year 2000 as “00”, but they also viewed the year 1900 as “00”. Imagine what would happen to half your programs if your computer suddenly thought the current year (2013) was actually the year 1913. Your calendar program, your watch, your smart phone and many other programs we rely on would suddenly be all wacked out. Imagine what would happen to the banking system if this glitch occurred. Would you be able to access your money? Would all your checks suddenly bounce? (On the other hand, maybe the banks would suddenly give us 100 years of accrued interest. But i digress …)

Now imagine if such a glitch were to occur in bigger systems like nuclear electric plants and nuclear weapons? What might go wrong? This is what had a lot of people in a near state of panic.

Would telephone systems shutdown? Would the electric grid turn off across the country – plunging all of us into darkness for an indeterminant amount of time? Would trains run on schedule? Would the air traffic control system lose control? Would our nuclear arsenal behave in some unpredicted manner and cause WWIII? Would the nuclear arsenal in some other country malfunction and bomb us?

It seemed nobody knew for sure what would – or would not – happen. People were concerned and scared.

Enter my favorite moron – Alex Jones.

On New Year’s Eve 1999, the night the clocks were due to change over to the year 2000, The Alex Jones show engaged in some of the most negligent, egregious and irresponsible scare mongering ever. I don’t know of a worse case than this.

In the 3 hours Jones was on the air, he made every conceivable claim of catastrophe imaginable. He took everything people were fearing about Y2K and he claimed those fears were materializing. Everything from cash machines failing, nuclear power plants shutting down, concentration camps (with shackles) being readied, empty grocery store shelves, gas stations out of gas, Martial Law declared, the military serving search warrants in 77 Texas counties – to an actual nuclear missile attack!!!!!!!!

And did any of this actually occur? No. None of it. People were so frightened they reportedly headed for the hills (literally) and got physically sick.

Bill Cooper’s original broadcast was 3 hours long. In the Alex Jones recording i present below, except for the opening 30 seconds, i have edited out all of Bill Cooper’s narratives so you can hear Alex Jones uninterrupted in all his despicable glory.

As i was going through the audio, i noticed breaks in the Alex Jones audio that i assume were done by Bill Cooper’s editing team in preparation for broadcast. Where ever i believed there was an edit i added a half-second “beep” sound. This is to help avoid confusion as the conversation would sometimes abruptly change topics. So listen for the beeps (you can’t miss them).

Below the audio you will find a complete transcript of notes i made of what to expect in the audio. This will help you follow along. Where ever you see the word “Regurgitation,” that is my own shorthand to indicate it is a previously mentioned point being repeated by Jones – a tactic he uses to give the impression he has a pile of information. Any words [inside brackets] are commentaries i made for myself.

Believe me, this is an audio clip Alex Jones wishes would go away.

Enjoy!

:)

Mason I. Bilderberg.

P.S. If anybody knows where i can find a copy of the full 3 hour Alex Jones Show from 12/31/1999 please let me know.

1:39 Pennsylvania nuclear plant (Limerick Generating Station) has been shut down [implied because of Y2K-related problems. Not true. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) findings are contained in the image, below]

1:49 The shelves (In TX) are empty of water and gas stations are running out of fuel

3:12 The government in Washington D.C. has set up a $50M command bunker that is hooked into FEMA and they can take over all the shortwave (radio), AM/FM radio stations and all television and other broadcast stations

3:34 The police and military [presumably nationwide] are on high alert

3:41 The military are highly visible [presumably in the streets]

3:45 Trains of military equipment moving into Austin, TX

3:53 The airport (Robert Mueller Airport) will be used as a massive holding facility [ala concentration camps]

6:00 They (Russia) have deployed their missiles and submarines against us (America).

6:09 Vladimir Putin, who just took over as Russian President, has “taken the codes off” Russia’s nuclear arsenal. (The Russian nuclear arsenal no longer requires a secret code to initiate a nuclear missile attack on America.)

6:25 Discussing America being hit with a nuclear first-strike and the ensuing annihilation.

7:27 Regurgitation: Pennsylvania Electric Company (PECO), Limerick Generating Station (here and here) was shutdown [presumably because of Y2K-related problems. Not true. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) findings are contained in the image, below].

7:38 Doesn’t challenge a caller paraphrasing (Colonel) Bo Gritz who said, that Russia said, if their (Russia) power goes out they will blame us and they (Russia) would set off their nuclear arsenal.

8:01 The Russians are threatening to nuke us every, single week.

8:25 Currencies around the world are plunging

8:39 Gas stations in America are out of gas

8:58 American’s are standing up as Russia threatens to attack us with nuclear weapons

9:02 Nuclear power plants are being shutdown

9:07 The military is “running around” with the police and the FBI saying terrorism is imminent [the takeover is beginning]

9:25 “They” have activated a powerful, cold war, radar system in the north pole region [presumably to keep an eye out for a Russian ICBM attack] that is affecting shortwave (radio)

9:46 Military traffic is EVERYWHERE

9:52 Regurgitation: Super power, cold war radar systems (presumably to keep an eye out for a Russian ICBM attack) and nuclear systems are up.

10:07 Fresno (California?) is blacked out, he (Jones) is off the internet

10:25 [Scare tactic, Survivalist Commercial]

11:03 “America is under siege right now.”

11:14 Regurgitation: Pennsylvania nuclear power plant shutdown

11:33 Egypt is having a run on the banks

11:45 Regurgitation: The power in Fresno (California?) is down, he is off the internet

11:50 Regurgitation: Cash machines and ATMs in Europe are having problems

12:03 Martial Law signs are posted on highway 65 in Arkansas by the Arkansas Transportation Department

21:18 There are “shackles on the ground, concreted into the ground” at Robert Mueller Airport – like a slave galley.

21:42 New Zealand is having power outages

21:57 Regurgitation: Pennsylvania nuclear power plant shutdown

22:33 Regurgitation: Vladimir Putin threatens to nuke us

22:50 Regurgitation: Pennsylvania nuclear power plant shutdown

22:55 The power is off in 8 different areas across the country

22:58 A lot of cable systems aren’t working

23:01 Satellites are down

23:09 “Minor fault (???) struck two nuclear power plants in Japan just seconds after the clock ticked into 2000 …”

23:25 Anybody near a nuclear power plant should pack up and go someplace else.

23:37 The store shelves are bare in Austin, TX.

23:43 Regurgitation: Gas is running out.

23:44 They’re announcing on the news that, “if you’re bad they’re going to put you in a … they’re going to bolt you to a pipe coming out of the ground at the airport (Robert Mueller Airport) in some cold hangar.”

24:04 “The military is serving search warrants now in 77 Texas counties.”

24:08 Regurgitation: “We got nuclear power plants shutting down.”

24:20 Regurgitation: The Russians are threatening to nuke us RIGHT NOW.

28:36 Regurgitation: It’s on ABC news that 5 nuclear missiles have been launched.

28:57 The night before (12/30/99), anything and everything on the flight line at Selfridge Air National Guard Base was put into the air and was constantly in the air. [i.e. The U.S. is preparing for a nuclear attack]

29:11 Regurgitation: Super power, cold war radar systems [presumably to keep an eye out for a Russian ICBM attack] are turned on.

29:21 The Russians are not the only ones we need to be concerned about … we should worry about the Chinese too.

20:24 We also need to be worried about Germany.

29:58 Regurgitation: It’s on ABC news that 5 nuclear missiles have been launched.

You don’t have to be mad to create conspiracy theories, but it certainly helps, new research suggests.

Just believing in them indicates you are more likely to be paranoid or mentally ill, a Victoria University study shows.

Widely held conspiracy theories range from harmless ones, such as the belief that the Moon landings were faked, to more dangerous delusions such as the one in Nigeria that polio vaccines were a Western plot to sterilise people. That led to vaccination crews being murdered and thousands dying from disease.

Clinical psychologist Darshani Kumareswaran is delving in to the psychology of conspiracy belief, and has found some believers are likely to endorse far-fetched plots in an effort to make sense of chaotic situations beyond their control.

Kumareswaran, who graduated from Victoria with a PhD in psychology this week, wanted to find out what made people more likely to believe in, or come up with, conspiracy theories – and whether the process was linked to mental illness.

Avid conspiracy theorists can put themselves under intense psychological strain with their tendency towards paranoid thinking and delusional beliefs, causing mental strain even when a conspiracy theory turns out to be a verified plot.

She also looked behind the common public image of the conspiracy theorist as a crackpot.

Despite evidence of verified conspiracies, such as the Watergate scandal, the public viewed conspiracy theorists in as negative a light as they did convicted criminals, she said.

“For the label to be so negatively rated by the public is quite a powerful finding.”

Study participants were asked to recall a situation in which they had no control, describe it in detail, and write it down. They were then put in a “psychological space” in which they felt powerlessness and were given 24 pictures that looked like snowy television screens.

Half featured obscured objects such as a chair or tent, the other half nothing.

Those who scored highly on a form of psychopathology known as schizotypy were more likely to see an object in the images where there was none, indicating they were more likely to make connections between unrelated things.

“I also found that someone who creates conspiracy theories is more likely to have some form of psychopathology, or mental illness such as . . .

As we’ve mentioned before, conspiracy theories can be found anywhere on the planet and can encompass just about any subject matter under the Sun. They are used to explain any mysterious event, albeit with a reasoning that can only be described as certifiably insane. Of course, the conspirators are almost always identified as belonging to a cabal of rich and powerful individuals, which brings us to the topic of depopulation. Overpopulation, exhaustion of natural resources, or evil designs are but a few of the reasons why depopulation conspiracy theories still occupy a special place in the minds of the paranoid.

10 • Pacte De Famine

Contrary to the popular notion that they are products of the American mind, depopulation conspiracy theories and their beginnings should actually be credited to the French, with their infamous Pacte de Famine (Famine Pact) in the late 18th century. During that period, a combination of unfavorable weather and relatively poor farming methods produced a severe food shortage across many regions of France, resulting in the raising of the prices of food and other basic commodities.

Due to this unfortunate event, many of the middle and lower classes—especially the peasants—believed that the aristocracy or some other shadowy group was secretly controlling the price of grains to control their burgeoning population. The paranoia led to the Flour War, a collective term for the series of riots and revolts that broke out in the affected areas. Incidentally, this atmosphere of fear and distrust helped to kick-start the French Revolution.

9 • The Human Genome Project Is A Eugenics Program

James Dewey Watson, American molecular biologist, geneticist and zoologist, best known as one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA in 1953. Shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. (Wikipedia)

We’ve previously discussed the Human Genome Project and the innumerable benefits it has brought to the human race. However, such a massive, well-funded program is not without its controversies. For one, there is a conspiracy theory which says that the project is actually nothing more than a cover for eugenicists to develop better methods of exterminating those people whom they have deemed inferior and unfit for this planet.

According to this conspiracy, the end goal of the project is the identification and elimination of “bad genes” across the world. Mapping out the human genome would allow the supposed conspirators to build better diseases and other biological weapons to subtly sterilize and wipe out inferior races. Even drugs would be customized to eliminate the targeted groups around the globe. As to the identity of the conspirators, it’s anyone’s guess. Of course, the usual suspects would include the CIA, the military, the Illuminati, or any other “evil” group.

8 • Global Warming Is An Excuse To Depopulate The World

By itself, global warming is already a very controversial topic. Its very existence is a constant subject of heated debate between affirmers and deniers. As if that isn’t enough, a few crazies in the deniers’ camp have stated that the campaign to stop global warming is really just a ruse to implement a depopulation program.

According to them, the crusade to cut back on fossil fuels and substances harmful to the environment would actually mean decreasing large-scale food and energy production throughout the world. This man-made famine and poverty would then result in a worldwide genocide and the destruction of the global economy, making it easier for whoever is behind the scheme to implement a New World Order. They claim that the ban on DDTs has already resulted in the deaths of more than 100 million people, while the ban on CFCs is killing 40 million people annually.

What is a conspiracy theory, why do people believe in them, and why do they tend to proliferate? Why does belief in one conspiracy correlate to belief in others? What are the triggers of belief, and how does group identity factor into it? How can one tell the difference between a true conspiracy and a false one? For the answers, download this free booklet, created by Michael Shermer and Pat Linse, the founders of Skeptic magazine and your Skeptics Society.

Who is old enough to remember Y2K? I remember it well (translation: i’m old).

Y2K is an acronym for “Year 2000,” or, as it was also known – “The Year 2000 problem, the Y2K problem, the Millennium bug, the Y2K bug, or simply Y2K.” (source) It was the moment when the clocks struck 12:00 AM on Janury 1, 2000 and how it might affect every aspect of our lives. Why?

The year 2000 was a problem for many computers because many computer programs stored years using only the last two digits of the year; for example, 1980 was stored as “80”, the year 1999 was stored as “99” and the year 2000 would be stored as “00”.

Do you see the problem? Not only did such systems view the year 2000 as “00”, but they also viewed the year 1900 as “00”. Imagine what would happen to half your programs if your computer suddenly thought the current year (2013) was actually the year 1913. Your calendar program, your watch, your smart phone and many other programs we rely on would suddenly be all wacked out. Imagine what would happen to the banking system if this glitch occurred. Would you be able to access your money? Would all your checks suddenly bounce? (On the other hand, maybe the banks would suddenly give us 100 years of accrued interest. But i digress …)

Now imagine if such a glitch were to occur in bigger systems like nuclear electric plants and nuclear weapons? What might go wrong? This is what had a lot of people in a near state of panic.

Would telephone systems shutdown? Would the electric grid turn off across the country – plunging all of us into darkness for an indeterminant amount of time? Would trains run on schedule? Would the air traffic control system lose control? Would our nuclear arsenal behave in some unpredicted manner and cause WWIII? Would the nuclear arsenal in some other country malfunction and bomb us?

It seemed nobody knew for sure what would – or would not – happen. People were concerned and scared.

Enter my favorite moron – Alex Jones.

On New Year’s Eve 1999, the night the clocks were due to change over to the year 2000, The Alex Jones show engaged in some of the most negligent, egregious and irresponsible scare mongering ever. I don’t know of a worse case than this.

In the 3 hours Jones was on the air, he made every conceivable claim of catastrophe imaginable. He took everything people were fearing about Y2K and he claimed those fears were materializing. Everything from cash machines failing, nuclear power plants shutting down, concentration camps (with shackles) being readied, empty grocery store shelves, gas stations out of gas, Martial Law declared, the military serving search warrants in 77 Texas counties – to an actual nuclear missile attack!!!!!!!!

And did any of this actually occur? No. None of it. People were so frightened they reportedly headed for the hills (literally) and got physically sick.

Bill Cooper’s original broadcast was 3 hours long. In the Alex Jones recording i present below, except for the opening 30 seconds, i have edited out all of Bill Cooper’s narratives so you can hear Alex Jones uninterrupted in all his despicable glory.

As i was going through the audio, i noticed breaks in the Alex Jones audio that i assume were done by Bill Cooper’s editing team in preparation for broadcast. Where ever i believed there was an edit i added a half-second “beep” sound. This is to help avoid confusion as the conversation would sometimes abruptly change topics. So listen for the beeps (you can’t miss them).

Below the audio you will find a complete transcript of notes i made of what to expect in the audio. This will help you follow along. Where ever you see the word “Regurgitation,” that is my own shorthand to indicate it is a previously mentioned point being repeated by Jones – a tactic he uses to give the impression he has a pile of information. Any words [inside brackets] are commentaries i made for myself.

Believe me, this is an audio clip Alex Jones wishes would go away.

Enjoy!

:)

Mason I. Bilderberg.

P.S. If anybody knows where i can find a copy of the full 3 hour Alex Jones Show from 12/31/1999 please let me know.

1:39 Pennsylvania nuclear plant (Limerick Generating Station) has been shut down [implied because of Y2K-related problems. Not true. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) findings are contained in the image, below]

1:49 The shelves (In TX) are empty of water and gas stations are running out of fuel

3:12 The government in Washington D.C. has set up a $50M command bunker that is hooked into FEMA and they can take over all the shortwave (radio), AM/FM radio stations and all television and other broadcast stations

3:34 The police and military [presumably nationwide] are on high alert

3:41 The military are highly visible [presumably in the streets]

3:45 Trains of military equipment moving into Austin, TX

3:53 The airport (Robert Mueller Airport) will be used as a massive holding facility [ala concentration camps]

6:00 They (Russia) have deployed their missiles and submarines against us (America).

6:09 Vladimir Putin, who just took over as Russian President, has “taken the codes off” Russia’s nuclear arsenal. (The Russian nuclear arsenal no longer requires a secret code to initiate a nuclear missile attack on America.)

6:25 Discussing America being hit with a nuclear first-strike and the ensuing annihilation.

7:27 Regurgitation: Pennsylvania Electric Company (PECO), Limerick Generating Station (here and here) was shutdown [presumably because of Y2K-related problems. Not true. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) findings are contained in the image, below].

7:38 Doesn’t challenge a caller paraphrasing (Colonel) Bo Gritz who said, that Russia said, if their (Russia) power goes out they will blame us and they (Russia) would set off their nuclear arsenal.

8:01 The Russians are threatening to nuke us every, single week.

8:25 Currencies around the world are plunging

8:39 Gas stations in America are out of gas

8:58 American’s are standing up as Russia threatens to attack us with nuclear weapons

9:02 Nuclear power plants are being shutdown

9:07 The military is “running around” with the police and the FBI saying terrorism is imminent [the takeover is beginning]

9:25 “They” have activated a powerful, cold war, radar system in the north pole region [presumably to keep an eye out for a Russian ICBM attack] that is affecting shortwave (radio)

9:46 Military traffic is EVERYWHERE

9:52 Regurgitation: Super power, cold war radar systems (presumably to keep an eye out for a Russian ICBM attack) and nuclear systems are up.

10:07 Fresno (California?) is blacked out, he (Jones) is off the internet

10:25 [Scare tactic, Survivalist Commercial]

11:03 “America is under siege right now.”

11:14 Regurgitation: Pennsylvania nuclear power plant shutdown

11:33 Egypt is having a run on the banks

11:45 Regurgitation: The power in Fresno (California?) is down, he is off the internet

11:50 Regurgitation: Cash machines and ATMs in Europe are having problems

12:03 Martial Law signs are posted on highway 65 in Arkansas by the Arkansas Transportation Department

21:18 There are “shackles on the ground, concreted into the ground” at Robert Mueller Airport – like a slave galley.

21:42 New Zealand is having power outages

21:57 Regurgitation: Pennsylvania nuclear power plant shutdown

22:33 Regurgitation: Vladimir Putin threatens to nuke us

22:50 Regurgitation: Pennsylvania nuclear power plant shutdown

22:55 The power is off in 8 different areas across the country

22:58 A lot of cable systems aren’t working

23:01 Satellites are down

23:09 “Minor fault (???) struck two nuclear power plants in Japan just seconds after the clock ticked into 2000 …”

23:25 Anybody near a nuclear power plant should pack up and go someplace else.

23:37 The store shelves are bare in Austin, TX.

23:43 Regurgitation: Gas is running out.

23:44 They’re announcing on the news that, “if you’re bad they’re going to put you in a … they’re going to bolt you to a pipe coming out of the ground at the airport (Robert Mueller Airport) in some cold hangar.”

24:04 “The military is serving search warrants now in 77 Texas counties.”

24:08 Regurgitation: “We got nuclear power plants shutting down.”

24:20 Regurgitation: The Russians are threatening to nuke us RIGHT NOW.

28:36 Regurgitation: It’s on ABC news that 5 nuclear missiles have been launched.

28:57 The night before (12/30/99), anything and everything on the flight line at Selfridge Air National Guard Base was put into the air and was constantly in the air. [i.e. The U.S. is preparing for a nuclear attack]

29:11 Regurgitation: Super power, cold war radar systems [presumably to keep an eye out for a Russian ICBM attack] are turned on.

29:21 The Russians are not the only ones we need to be concerned about … we should worry about the Chinese too.

20:24 We also need to be worried about Germany.

29:58 Regurgitation: It’s on ABC news that 5 nuclear missiles have been launched.

Hello initiates and welcome to module one of the Illumicorp video training course. I would like to officially welcome you as a member of the team.

You’ve joined our organization at perhaps the most exciting point in our long history. Our founders shared a passionate dream. To transform this country, and eventually the whole world to one cohesive organization.

This presentation is designed to enlighten you about our organization’s goals and achievements. As your guide, I will help to answer some basic questions you might have about Illumicorp, and familiarize you with the valuable role you will play in helping us reach our prime objective. So please, take a tour with me as we march together towards an exciting new world.

In 1871, a man named Albert Pike published a book called Morals and Dogma.

Conspiracists call this book a manifesto, a primary doctrine for Masons and, contained within its pages is absolute proof Albert Pike was a Satanist who wrote secret Satan worship into the degrees of the Scottish Rite.

Who is Albert Pike? What is his book about? What was the extent of his influence? Do Freemasons worship Satan?

Some people would call David Icke controversial. I would call him a brilliant psychotic.

His ability to speak for hours on an incomprehensible doctrine is stunning. But listen carefully and the methods of his madness become apparent.

He has a brilliant talent for the subtle interweaving of plausible with crazy, and packaging the in-between gray areas as thought-terminating clichés like “secret societies”, “brotherhood”, “free masons” and other slogans and catchphrases popular with modern conspiracy thinking.

The magic is in his ability to dispense seemingly innocuous tidbits of (allegedly true) earth history one moment, then slipping in talk of aliens crossbreeding with humans the next moment. Talk sane, touch on some crazy, go back to the safety of sane. Rinse and repeat until the listener can swallow the crazy with the sane.

This ability to subtlely slide in and out of the realm of plausible is the same potent cocktail used by science fiction writers to blur the lines between the possible and the impossible to keep viewers coming back for more.

This 25 minute video has been distilled from a 217 minute video. I’ve removed the plausible to expose the rest. Enjoy.

The items on this varied list may not all warrant heightened vigilance and tin foil hats, but better safe than sorry. So we’re all better prepared for welcoming the Lizard People, when they finally choose to reveal themselves, and assimilating to the New World Order, here are some of the best conspiracy theories and urban legends in the U.S.

10 • Area 51, probably underground, Nev.

Arguably, the country’s most famous conspiracy theory is focused on this remote part of Edwards Air Force Base in Southern Nevada. Also known as Groom Lake, it’s assumed the base is used to test aircraft and weapons systems. The air space overhead is absolutely restricted. Even Air Force pilots aren’t allowed to breach the perimeter. The extraordinary secrecy surrounding the base has fueled several Area 51 conspiracy theories over the years ranging from a lab/prison for studying aliens (both living and dead), a meeting place for Earthlings and aliens working in tandem on various projects, reverse engineering and testing of captured/recovered alien technology, developing a weather control system, time travel and teleportation technology and much more. All that said, nothing can be certain as everything that occurs in Area 51 is classified as “Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information.” The CIA didn’t publicly acknowledge the existence of the base until July 2013.

9 • Denver Airport, Colo.

A detail of a mural in Denver International Airport, subject of much conspiracy theorist interest. A plea for peace, or a plan for future martial law?

Another conspiracy theory layer cake spot is Denver International Airport. That it was built while Denver had a perfectly good airport much closer to the city is the jumping off point for these theories. (For the record, experts have pointed out that the runway layout at the old airport was no longer efficient enough for the increased traffic.) It’s believed that building the new airport allowed for the secret construction of an underground headquarters for the Illuminati, or the New World Order, or the Neo-Nazis, or the Lizard People and so on. The vaguely Swastika-shaped runways, the (admittedly) disturbing murals and sculptures, and odd words engraved in the floor also fuel the theories. Furthermore, there is the question of funding. A stone in the terminal says the airport was funded by “The New World Airport Commission,” a nebulous entity, sanely theorized to be a group of local businesses, though many claim it doesn’t exist.

8 • UFO cover-up, Roswell, N.M.

Though it’s now mainly fueled by local businesses wanting to cash in on tourist interest, the (alleged!) Roswell UFO incident of 1947 is the most popular (alleged!) UFO cover-up of all time and still merits time and energy among conspiracy theorists and movie/TV writers. Various people claim that a spacecraft with alien occupants crashed on a ranch near Roswell in June or July 1947, which was quietly hauled away for study, possibly by our friends at Area 51. The Air Force reported at the time that the object was a surveillance balloon. The conspiracy chatter didn’t flare up until 1978 when Major Jesse Marcel, who was involved with the recovery of the debris, gave an interview describing a spacecraft crash cover-up by the military. Since then additional witnesses have emerged, describing the cover-up and alien autopsies. These days, even passionate pro-UFO advocates generally dismiss Roswell as a hoax.

7 • Grassy knoll in Dallas, Texas

The grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza, where the 1963 assasination of US President John F. Kennedy took place in Dallas.

The Warren Commission concluded that there was no conspiracy involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963. However, after Lee Harvey Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby, an event that also brims with conspiracy, the theories that Oswald didn’t act alone or maybe wasn’t involved at all started flying. The situation was exacerbated in 1979 when the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations announced “…a high probability that two gunmen fired at [the] President.” Furthermore, while he was living in Belarus, it’s said Oswald was such a terrible shot that friends were afraid to go hunting with him. The dazzling list of conspiracy theories put forward at one point or another involve the collusion of one or more parties including the CIA, the FBI and/or FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, the Mafia, anti-Castro Cuban exile groups, Castro himself, then Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, and the KGB.

6 • Kensington Runestone, Runestone Museum in Alexandria, Minn.

Kensington Runestone

Evidence that Scandinavian explorers pushed as far as the Midwest of the future United States in the 14th century or a 19th-century hoax? The Kensington Runestone is a 200 lb slab of greywacke inscribed with runes on the face and side. The story goes the stone was found in 1898 in the rural township of Solem, Minnesota (it gets its name from Kensington, a nearby settlement) by Swedish immigrant Olof Olsson Ohman. The Stone appears to describe an expedition of Norwegians and Swedes who camped in the area, then retreated to their boat at “the inland sea” after 10 were slaughtered by unknown assailants. Runologists and linguistic experts overwhelming agree that the language used on the stone is too modern (circa the 19th century, coincidentally) and didn’t match other writing samples from the 1300s. However, the legend persists, being occasionally revived with new evidence and arguments, some as recently the 1990s.

The only unsolved case of air piracy in U.S. history was perpetrated by an unidentified man who the media came to call “D. B. Cooper.” (The hijacker purchased his ticket using the alias “Dan Cooper.”) On November 24, 1971, Cooper hijacked a passenger plane (a Boeing 727) during a Portland-Seattle flight. Claiming he had a bomb, he made his ransom plans known to the crew. On the ground in Seattle, Cooper released the passengers after officials gave him the requested $200,000 (equivalent to $1,160,000 today) and two parachutes. With only Cooper and the crew aboard, the plane then took off heading for Mexico. When they stopped in Reno to refuel, Cooper was gone, having jumped from the rear stairs while the plane was likely still over Washington State. Cooper was never found and it’s widely believe he couldn’t have possibly survived the fall, over remote mountainous wilderness, at night, wearing a trench coat and loafers, no helmet, into an initial wind chill at the airplane’s altitude of “70∞ F. The FBI investigation into the case remains open to this day.

Contrails are the wispy white clouds of frozen water vapor that streak across the sky in the wake of jet engines. But according to 17 percent of 18 to 29-year-olds—my generation—contrails are actually “chemtrails,” poisonous chemicals sprayed by the government for sinister reasons. As the world becomes an increasingly scary and complex place with no simple answers, the temptation to create narratives explaining all of its evil will grow. And here lies the heart of the modern conspiracy theory. Yet when fantasy overtakes reality, progress suffers.

Whenever anything bad happens in the world today, from September 11th to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, there is a growing gaggle quick to cry, “wake up sheeple!” Tragedies like the Boston Marathon bombing and September 11th are of course “false flag” operations by a sinister cabal—the CIA, New World Order, Neocons, Illuminati, Jews, and Rothchilds are the usual suspects—but so are natural disasters. Twisters in the Midwest: Weather weapons being tested by the Pentagon. The Indian Ocean Tsunami: Caused by a nuclear weapon detonated in a deep ocean trench. Even the Earthquake in Haiti was the result of malicious meddling. As one blogger alerts us, “If you just assume it was a natural disaster, you are probably not current with what technology is capable of.” Omitted were any credentials explaining how the writer is more knowledgeable on technology than the rest of us.

But who cares? Isn’t questioning big government and corporate dominance over our lives a good thing? Sure it is. But losing the ability to distinguish between the reality and paranoia won’t do us any good.

Let’s look at three hot topics on conspiracy websites: vaccines, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and fluoride—or as one website put it, the three biggest human rights tragedies of our time.

Far from a tragedy, vaccines have saved millions of lives. We are currently living in what UNICEF calls the Child Survival Revolution. Children no longer perish from dreadful, agonizing diseases as they have throughout most of history. Vaccinations are a major reason why. But good news is usually no news, which is why headlines such as “Plane Lands Safely” or “Swimmer Not Attacked by Shark” don’t exist, yet their opposites certainly do. As a result, society tends to underappreciate progress. Perhaps this explains why the loud voices behind the anti-vaccine movement . . .

Although conspiracy theories can pop up anywhere in the world, they’ve become an integral part of American culture and history. Even the founding of the country was steeped in conspiracy theory, specifically that King George III planned to deprive the colonies of their rights. There’s nothing more American than not trusting your government, especially considering the number of conspiracy theories that turn out to be true.

10 • The US Government Turned Its Citizens Into Collateral

According to this conspiracy theory pushed by members of the so-called “redemption movement,” the US government turned its own citizens into collateral in 1933 when it stopped using the gold standard so it could keep borrowing money. Supposedly, this made all American citizens unwitting slaves of international Jewish bankers.

As movement leader Roger Elvick explained, every time a new citizen is born, the government awards his “straw man,” or twin, with a secret bank account worth $630,000. He also claims that citizens have the right to access their twins’ bank accounts, which can be done by performing certain legal maneuvers.

Of course, members who attempted to access their secret bank accounts often found themselves in trouble with the law. Elvick himself did prison time during most of the 1990s for issuing more than $1 million in bad checks and filing falsified IRS forms. He found himself in trouble again in 2005 when he was charged with forgery and extortion.

9 • The North American Union

In another nutty conspiracy theory involving the New World Order, there are those who believe that insidious forces are working behind the scenes to turn the US, Canada, and Mexico into one superstate called the North American Union (NAU). The system will be modeled after the European Union and eventually lead to a one-world government.

Adherents believe that this conspiracy includes building a superhighway that would stretch from Yukon to the Yucatan, the promotion of a consolidated currency called the “amero,” and the installation of Spanish as the primary language. They also claim that the existence of legitimate groups like the North American Free Trade Agreement and Council on Foreign Relations is proof that the creation of the NAU is already in full swing. As to who the culprits could be, it is said that industrialists are behind this scheme, since they stand to benefit the most from a free market.

8 • Black Genocide

Given the oppression and discrimination that the black population of the US has faced for hundreds of years, it was not hard to see this coming. This conspiracy theory refers to an alleged institutionalized policy by the US government to decrease or wipe out the African-American population using a variety of medical and other methods. Aside from implementing harsh socioeconomic conditions, this also includes promoting birth control, performing abortions and sterilizations, and abetting lynchings and murders against the black community.

The term first came into existence in the 1950s, when the Civil Rights Congress presented its petition to the United Nations for relief from what it called the government-sponsored genocide of black people. It later entered the popular lexicon after the introduction of the birth control pill and subsequent legalization of abortion. It has since become a favorite rallying cry for activists and conspiracy theorists alike any time widespread persecution of the black community is perceived.

7 • The US Government Is Operating On Maritime/Military Law

Proponents of this theory, including the notoriously litigious “sovereign citizens movement,” contend that a massive conspiracy changed the original government, which operated on common and constitutional law, into one that observes maritime/military law. Unlike the first government, which allowed its citizens complete freedom, the second stripped them of all rights and only conferred upon them privileges designed to make them dependent on the government.

They also believe that the judicial system has been fully aware of the insidious changes all this time but prefer to keep silent to continue enslaving the people. The proof of its complicity is supposedly validated by the presence of gold-fringed US flags that fly over courthouses and other federal buildings. According to theorists, this is a military flag, an assertion that the Flag Research Center has refuted. This outlandish belief has led to numerous run-ins with the law for believers, with occasionally deadly results.

6 • The Constitution Has Been Suspended Since 1933

According to prominent patriot movement member Eugene Schroder in his book The Constitution: Fact or Fiction, President Franklin Roosevelt allegedly suspended the Constitution when he signed the Emergency Banking Relief Act in 1933, which amended the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917. This supposedly allowed him considerable power to oversee trading and the flow of gold even when the country was not at war.

Schroder contends that Roosevelt, who later outlawed gold-hoarding, essentially declared war against his own people and used the new law to benefit a secret cabal inside the White House. His successors went on to discreetly increase the executive powers of the federal government even more, using World War II and the Cold War as excuses. As a result, the government apparently now has unlimited control over the economy. Schroder also claims that since Roosevelt supposedly never relinquished his powers, the people have been unwittingly living under martial law for decades.

Supporters of conspiracy peddler Alex Jones are FURIOUS that I dared to note his dismissal of the Apollo 11 mission. Talk about a lunatic fringe.

The worst thing about being a moon landing denier is, apparently, the part where reporters call you out for labeling Apollo 11 as some kind of false flag operation.When I wrote a story about Kentucky Senator Rand Paul’s relationship with his father—and the impact it might have on his chances of getting the Republican presidential nomination—I expected some pushback. But not like this.

My characterization of radio host Alex Jones (a frequent promoter of the Pauls) sparked outrage among his devotees. Specifically, they got all rage-y because I referred to Jones as a “moon landing denier.” A weird thing to quibble about, considering he is a moon landing denier.

Alex Jones, I wrote, is “a noted conspiracy theorist who spreads his message on his syndicated radio show and on his website, Infowars.com. Jones is a moon landing denier who believes the government acted as a guiding hand for the September 11 attacks and the Oklahoma City bombing, buys into the New World Order—the theory that a group of so-called elites are conspiring to form a singular, totalitarian global government has accused American pop stars of being purveyors of Illuminati mind control.”

.@Olivianuzzi, in your hit piece, you label Alex Jones a “moon landing denier,” when he has repeatedly said the opposite….1/2

@PrisonPlanet—aka Paul Joseph Watson—is editor-at-large of Infowars.com, Jones’ site. There is rich irony in having the editor of Infowars.com charge that your job is to “make up shit.” Infowars.com, for the uninitiated, is a very special place where ideas like the Super Bowl halftime show is an illuminati ritual, and that President Obama has called for a New World Order, are welcome. The website even sells iodine drops, called “Survival Shield,” at their official store.

I consider myself a collector of sorts. I collect strange, bizarre notions and theories that warp traditional narratives about reality and existence. The following is a presentation of 10 of my favorite mind-blowing theories. There is compelling evidence for each, but you certainly don’t – and, for the sake of your sanity, probably shouldn’t – need to take them as gospel.

1 • The Singularity: We will transcend biology and live as posthuman Gods

Futurists like Ray Kurzweil say in the coming decades humans will experience a technological singularity by which we will transcend biology itself. Intelligent civilizations such as ours, says Kurzweil, are destined to evolve into super-intelligent, possibly machine-based beings whose computational powers grow exponentially.

After such a singularity, we would be able to harness the power of our own sun in order to accomplish interstellar feats only dreamed of in science fiction, such as creating Dyson Spheres and literally saturating the known universe with consciousness.

Some progressive thinkers like Noam Chomsky have labeled the theory science fiction, while others question the classist undertones of the theory’s transhumanist enthusiasts.

Project Blue Beam is a highly controversial conspiracy theory. Originally proposed by Canadian journalist Serge Monast in 1994, it holds that the New World Order will use advanced holographic technology in order to create a false flag alien invasion and/or a worldwide religious “awakening” in order to achieve servitude by the masses and acceptance of a one world government and religion and possibly depopulation efforts as well.

There are supposedly 4 parts to the implementation of Project Blue Beam. These stages include:

The dissolution of major religions due to archaeological discoveries disproving them.

A holographic “space show” in which deities and aliens appear as our overlords (it is not clear how these two would coexist).

Telepathic Electronic Two Way Communication, via ELF(Extra Low Frequency), VLF (Very Low Frequency), and LF (Low Frequency) waves, whereby people will think they are being spoken to by the new true God or extraterrestrial overlords.

Use of worldwide microchips to fabricate horrifying supernatural events that will make people desperate for the New World Order.

Predictive programming is the idea that society embeds messages into pop culture media and other modes of transmission in order to psychologically prepare and incubate the general population for certain events. It is, of course, a conspiracy theory,

Many people maintain instances of predictive programming are simply coincidences on par with synchronicity and Déjà vu; others say they are sinister calling cards for shadow groups who communicate across media channels through coded signals.
(Source)

4 • Human DNA contains the signature of an alien creator

New evidence is suggesting that instead of searching the stars with telescopes, we should have been searching our DNA with microscopes. Vladimir I. shCherbak of al-Farabi Kazakh National University of Kazakhstan, and Maxim A. Makukov of the Fesenkov Astrophysical Institute claim they have discovered an intelligent signal inside human DNA. In this case, “biological SETI” as it’s known, involves “arithmetical and ideographical patterns of symbolic language.”

In other words, it’s possible that an intelligent species encoded a message or signature into the very structure of our DNA. (Source | Photo)

Howdy! I hope everyone’s summer is off to a swell start, and that, wherever this newsletter finds you, you are healthy, happy, and as intent as ever on clandestinely controlling every facet of global influence with the quiet and cruel fist of the élite.

It is an exciting time to be in the Illuminati! We have just welcomed a whole slew of wonderful new members into our family, all of whom look forward to meeting you at one of our bi-monthly meet-and-greets hosted by Rupert Murdoch, hitting the links for a round of golf on the recently reopened Clear Channel eighteen-hole course, or even just talking universal suppression of the common man over a highball in the newly refurbished NATO Oasis Lounge. And that’s just the beginning! So please do not hesitate to introduce yourself to our neophytes: Lupita Nyong’o, Ted Cruz, Michael Sam, Savannah Guthrie, and (yes, finally!) Blue Ivy Carter. Welcome, Fledgling Mercenaries of the New World Order!

But, first things first—I want to thank everyone for such a terrific turnout at our Viva La Revolución Fiesta Fundraiser back in March. I mean, wow! Go, team! With your help, we raised over 1.2 trillion dollars. Not too shabby! That money will go directly into bolstering bastions of religious influence in Latin America, pumping psychoactive carcinogens into domestic water supplies, and a long overdue paint job in the women’s locker room. Major props to Chuck Todd, Ludacris, and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for putting in so much time and effort, as well as Jamba Juice and the Banco Central de Chile for making the night possible. You guys literally rule!

Now, August may feel far away, but trust me, enlightened few, Family Fun Night is just around the corner. Remember, this year’s theme is “proletariat fools,” so please tell your kids to start picking out their favorite naïve peon for the costume contest. First prize is two hundred dollars cash and a future ambassadorship.

It’s difficult to imagine the kind of suffering the family of Grace McDonnell has endured. In some ways it feels disrespectful to even believe you can, given the enormity of what happened to them. The same can no doubt be said for the parents and loved ones of all the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting. And yet Grace’s parents, in particular, have been subjected not only to the relentless pain of losing their young daughter, but, recently, to the psychopathic whims of those who believe their child never existed in the first place — those who believe that she was some kind of phantasm concocted by faceless nefarious entities trying to pull a fast one on the American public for who knows what reason. These people, Sandy Hook truthers, are a unique product of our time: self-righteous fools full of misplaced intellectual certitude, bolstered by digital misinformation and the confederacy of like-minded lunatics social media can provide to them.

It was one of these truthers, these conspiracy theorists to whom notions like logic and reason are meaningless, who stole a sign placed at a memorial playground honoring Grace McDonnell in Mystic, Conn. last week. This same person then called Lynn McDonnell, Grace’s still-grieving mother, and told her that he was on to her — that her child had never been real and was merely part of the elaborate hoax that was Sandy Hook. When news of this began making the rounds, most decent people responded as you would expect them to: with visceral outrage. I myself wrote a piece here in response to the provocation that attempted to call-out the monster responsible. It was titled “An Open Letter To Whoever Stole a Sandy Hook Victim’s Memorial Sign” and through The Daily Banter and The Huffington Post it received a good amount of attention and circulation. It even received, it seems, the attention of the person it was aimed at — the person who actually stole the sign.

On Tuesday, my co-worker and friend Bob Cesca called me out of the blue to pass along a pretty disturbing bit of information. He said that he had just taken a call from a relative of his who lives in Northern Virginia, and that this relative told him that a stranger had just shown up at his doorstep demanding to see Bob. The man apparently was hoping to talk to Bob in an effort to contact me. He claimed to be the person who had stolen the sign from Grace McDonnell’s memorial playground. He gave Bob’s relative a local public phone number and asked him to get in contact with Bob who would then get in contact with me and tell me to give him a call. My first thought upon hearing this, after being concerned for the safety of Bob’s family, was that whoever had appeared out of the blue in Northern Virginia looking for me wasn’t really anyone I wanted to speak to. He may have made a surprising — and somewhat disconcerting — amount of effort to get in touch with me, but that didn’t mean he was anything more than a garden variety nutjob who’d read my piece and wanted to take credit for an unconscionable offense in the name of getting attention. But I took down the number and called it as soon as I hung up with Bob.

The person who answered the line sounded lucid, which made it all the more unnerving that what he began saying right off the bat was a panoply of conspiratorial crazy. He asked me if I’d heard of the Illuminati. If I knew about Bohemian Grove. If I understood that my ex-employer CNN was helping to usher in the New World Order. He kept referring to Anderson Cooper as my former boss, for some reason. (I never worked on Cooper’s show and even if I had he wouldn’t have technically been my boss.) He insisted that during CNN’s Sandy Hook coverage, Cooper had held up an owl, which he said was the symbol of Bohemian Grove and those working to bring about a one-world government. When I told him that I personally knew about a dozen people who covered Sandy Hook and were on-scene in the aftermath of the shooting, he demanded to know if those people had actually seen any bodies. He insisted, among other supposed giveaways, that none of the parents of the Sandy Hook victims cried on camera, proving that they either weren’t actually grieving or were paid actors.

“Well, they can’t help but smile,” I said. “You would too if you were a member of the Illuminati.”

What is the Pilgrims Society? This organization has been called a ‘dinner club’ by some and a back-door policy think tank by others. But what’s the truth? Why do some conspiracy theorists believe the Society controls policy decisions in the United Kingdom and the United States?

In Skeptoid Episode #364, Brian made a statement regarding conspiracy theories that I’ve since used many times in my continued battle against tinfoil-helmeted nonsense. It’s simple, direct, and 100% true:

No conspiracy theory has ever been proven true.

A less-elegant and wordier way to say this is that there has never been a popularly held conspiracy theory, ie, a non-evidenced belief that a group of powerful people secretly worked together to do something harmful, that later had compelling evidence to prove that said conspiracy was real.

Don’t think too hard about it, little guy.

Whenever I use this argument in social media, I’m invariably sent one of about half a dozen different internet listicles that attempt to prove me wrong by going through a number of conspiracies or conspiracy theories that were later proven to be real. One is a really long slog from Infowars. Another is from Cracked. There are still others from Listverse, Style Slides and True Activist.

What much of the content on these lists, as well as those who send them to me, get wrong on a pretty consistent basis is that there is a difference between a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory. Conspiracies are real, and many of them have been proven conclusively to have taken place at all times throughout history. Some of these include the conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, the conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler (the so-called July 20th plot), the conspiracy to throw the 1919 World Series, American tobacco companies conspiring to suppress scientific research that painted their products as harmful, and so on. All of these are real and none of them are theories.

Likewise, things like 9/11 being an inside job, JFK being shot by multiple gunmen, chemtrails, the existence of an all-powerful New World Order, FEMA camps and any number of banking and currency related plots are all conspiracy theories. That is to say, they are all theories that a conspiracy took place – and most have little to no evidence supporting those theories.

Not only is there a difference between a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory, there are all manner of reasons why people would “conspire” about something – and they’re not all bad or harmful. There are perfectly legitimate reasons why a government or corporation would want to keep something secret, whether it’s a patented technology, proprietary research or a sensitive national security matter. Like it or not, not everyone gets to know everything.

With all of this in mind, I want to take a look at one of the lists I’ve been sent a couple of times. It’s representative of the general tone and content of the other lists, and has the added advantage of being from a reputable source, Business Insider. This is a good example of a list of “conspiracies” that is not a list of conspiracy theories, and isn’t even all “conspiracies.”

That’s a lot of qualifiers. To be on this list, the plot has to be huge (whatever that means), driven by the government, and proven to be a conspiracy that with compelling evidence to support its existence.

1. The U.S. Department of the Treasury poisoned alcohol during Prohibition — and people died.

This is completely true. The Treasury, in its capacity to enforce the Volstead Act, added deadly chemicals to the industrial alcohol that was being used by bootleggers as a substitute for grain alcohol. While the poisoning became public knowledge very quickly, over 1,000 people still died in New York alone, thanks to this true conspiracy.

2. The U.S. Public Health Service lied about treating black men with syphilis for more than 40 years.

Another true conspiracy, and one that the CDC openly acknowledges – making up for decades of knowingly sickening hundreds of poor black men. But even during the heyday of the experiment, it was never a popularly discussed theory, and it’s been public knowledge for four decades.

3. More than 100 million Americans received a polio vaccine contaminated with a potentially cancer-causing virus.

Here’s a perfect example of something that’s not a conspiracy, certainly not a government conspiracy and not even true. The Business Insider piece relies on debunked testimony from anti-vaxxer Barbara Loe Fisher to back up the pseudoscience claim that millions of doses of Jonas Salk’s original formulation of the polio vaccine contained the “cancer causing virus” SV40. But no compelling evidence exists that SV40 actually causes any harm in humans (SV stands for simian virus), and virtually every source that makes this claim is strongly anti-vaccination.

The author of the BI piece is either anti-vaccine or fell for anti-vaccine propaganda.

4. Parts of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which led to U.S. intervention in Vietnam, never happened.

USS Maddox in action against North Vietnamese torpedo boats (navy.mil)

This would indeed be a “huge government conspiracy” if it were true. As I wrote about in my piece on false flag attacks, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident was actually two separate attacks on a US destroyer by North Vietnamese torpedo boats in August 1964. The first was an actual attack, with bullet holes in both the destroyer Maddox and the North Vietnamese boats to prove it.

The second was theorized even at the time to be a phantom attack, featuring jittery US sailors shooting at shadows. While we now know that this “attack” didn’t happen, there was a tremendous amount of confusion in the White House shortly afterwards, and subsequent tapes show President Johnson openly wondering what happened. It could be argued that there was a conspiracy to make the Incident fit the Johnson administration’s desire to expand US involvement in Vietnam, that’s a conspiracy of a different color.

Hello initiates and welcome to module one of the Illumicorp video training course. I would like to officially welcome you as a member of the team.

You’ve joined our organization at perhaps the most exciting point in our long history. Our founders shared a passionate dream. To transform this country, and eventually the whole world to one cohesive organization.

This presentation is designed to enlighten you about our organization’s goals and achievements. As your guide, I will help to answer some basic questions you might have about Illumicorp, and familiarize you with the valuable role you will play in helping us reach our prime objective. So please, take a tour with me as we march together towards an exciting new world.

We like to categorize and apply labels. This can be helpful in wrapping your mind around complex reality, as long as you avoid the pitfall of allowing labels to become mental straitjackets.

I often discuss various categories of people who are failing, in one or more important ways, to apply critical thinking. These categories are not meant to be dismissive, but rather to help understand various styles of thinking that lead people astray. For example there are deniers, true-believers, ideologues, and cranks.

Perhaps the most interesting category is the conspiracy theorist. I also find them to be the most consistent in their style of reasoning and argument. I do wonder, however, how much of this consistency is due to and underlying reasoning style and how much is culture. When I get the same fallacious argument over and over again, is that because they are all reading the same source material?

I recently came across a conspiracy website offering advice on how to answer “anti-conspiracy theorists” (their word for skeptics). Anyone who has had a conversation with a conspiracy theorist will recognize the style and tone, and now here it is codified in a primer for budding conspiracy theorists.

The article, however, also reveals the logical errors that underlie the conspiracy belief system. Let’s go through each point.

“You sound like a conspiracy theorist.”

RESPONSE: “Conspiracy Theorist? Now tell me the truth, where did you hear that term…on TV? (Laugh.) …So let me get this straight. Are you saying that men in high positions of power are not capable of criminal activity and telling lies to the general public? Are you really that naive?” (Laugh as you say this.)

As you can see this is a literal script. Right up front we see what I have found to be the typical attitude of the conspiracy theorists – anyone who does not buy their fantastical theories is “naive,” – said with dismissive laughter. This response is also a straw man.

Of course people in power are capable of lying and criminal activity. There are even genuine conspiracies. The recent lane-closing scandal in New Jersey was a conspiracy of at least several civil servants who lied and conspired to abuse their power to punish their political enemies (heedless of collateral damage).

When we talk about conspiracy theorists we are talking about grand conspiracies. These are conspiracies that involved large numbers of people, a vast expanse of power and control, unbelievable secrecy, and often sustained for years or decades. Of course there is no sharp demarcation between a small and plausible conspiracy and a grand conspiracy, but the larger the conspiracy would need to be, the more implausible it becomes. The largest grand conspiracies simply collapse under their own weight.

Ah, but the author has heard this response before and has an answer:

“You’re absolutely right. I agree with you 100%. It is impossible to totally cover up a conspiracy so massive. That’s why I know about it! What you must understand is that they don’t have to cover it up totally. Even a bucket that has a few leaks can still do the job of carrying water from here to there! They only need to fool 80% of the public, which isn’t hard to do when you control the major networks and newspapers.”

Of course the conspiracy theorists have to have learned about the conspiracy, but this entirely misses the point. Conspiracy theorists don’t have actual evidence. They don’t have leaked information, documents, photographs, or any hard or direct evidence of their specific conspiracy theory. As you will see from later responses – they simply believe they have perceived a pattern in events.

This cuts to the heart of the logical fallacies at the core of conspiracy thinking. The conspirators in grand conspiracies have as much power, control, and reach as they need to pull off the conspiracy. Any missing evidence was covered up by the conspiracy. Any evidence against the conspiracy or for a more prosaic explanation was planted. Any events that would seem to undermine the conspiracy theory were clearly false flag operations.

Conspiracy theories are therefore immune to evidence. They are closed, self-contained belief systems that resist their own critical analysis. That is why they are a mental trap.

Often conspiracy theorists are generally smart people (even if they lack certain critical thinking skills). Smart people, however, are good at . . .

Had enough government rhetoric? Tired of following the sheeple? Fed up with believing what THEY want you to believe? Maybe it’s time to branch out and discover THE TRUTH.

If you’re new to the exciting world of conspiracy theories and just can’t decide which paranoid delusion best suits you, then why not use this handy flowchart to find your ideal conspiracy theory. Then you too can go and stick it to THE MAN.

(Click image for larger view)

Click image for larger view

“You know, this explains a lot. Because all my life, I’ve had this unaccountable feeling in my bones that something sinister was happening in the universe and that no one would tell me what it was.” Arthur Dent

NB This is not intended to be a complete list, but please don’t let that stop you commenting to let me know what I’ve missed off :)

Perhaps one of the biggest problems with people who traffic in endless conspiracy theories is that nothing – absolutely nothing – can be taken at face value. In the clip below from Iran’s Press TV, a man identified as Political Commentator named Dr. Kevin Barrett weaves a conspiracy theory so convoluted, it might cause you to space out at some point. Stick with it though because he brings it all home by implicating Jacob Rothschild in the missing Malaysian airliner mystery.

The original video can be found here on YouTube but, honestly, don’t bother, it’s just more of the same ol’ mumbo-jumbo nonsense from the lunatics.

So, what to do?

Here . . . watch this version of the video that i made with my own two skeptical hands. This is how seriously all these nut jobs should be taken:

Unfortunately some individuals take conspiracy theories to a disturbingly excessive extreme.

Ever been accused of being a government plant or paid off by “The Man”? Then you’ve never run into a hardcore conspiracy theorist. Be grateful, because such encounters are often as baffling as they are annoying.

That statement may ruffle the feathers of those who view such a comment as an attempt to make conspiracy theorists look “bonkers” (a favorite accusation of the more paranoid conspiracy theorists…).

However, at some point people need to be able to back up their arguments with facts and not the assertion that a total stranger is being paid to spread misinformation.

There is a big difference between indulging in the belief that things are being purposely hidden by individuals with nefarious purposes and the need to accuse everyone who doesn’t think like you of being on the inside of some master scheme.

It’s important to remember that unethical government and business practices are actually readily acknowledged by the average person as these events are often front page news.

[ . . . ]

So when do conspiracy theories go off the rails?

1.) When they are developed based on unsubstantiated fear and bigotry rather than supporting evidence. At the heart of the more bizarre conspiracies is often the belief that the theorist is in danger.

Really, if what you knew was so dangerous, it’s logical to believe that you’d already be dead instead of living to blab all over Facebook and Reddit from a computer that’s more traceable than you think.

There’s actually no reason to be afraid because…

2.) You’re just not that special. Some people seek to uncover the truth in order to bring a very real wrong to the attention of the world. Others spend all day discussing their opinion on the internet because of a need to convince the world of how much smarter they are than everyone else.

It’s easy to guess which group is useful and proactive and which group is full of ridiculously entitled windbags.

At the end of the day, conspiracy theories are suppose to be centered around a mysterious event. When each discussion is brought around to you and your ego…you’ve lost the plot.

3.) You are not entitled to know everything. Imagine that you knew everything there is to know about the universe and all events from the beginning to the end of time.

The New World Order, or NWO, is one of the most well-known conspiracy theories in modern history, right up there with the faked moon landings. In fact, there are those who believe that the NWO orchestrated the fake landings to reinforce their control over the population. Like a handful of cookie crumbs, the NWO has a way of slipping into the cracks behind every other far-fetched theory, and like entropy, the theories about them only get bigger with time. Just keep in mind that as plausible as these theories sound, they are, unfortunately, absolutely insane.

10 • The Ten Kings Prophecy

Conspiracy theories that begin with the Bible are nothing new, but according to some people, the New World Order was very specifically predicted in the Book of Revelation. The Ten Kings Prophecy is the theory that 10 nations will rise to power and create a new government. The “prophecy” usually quoted for this comes from Revelation 17:12, which reads “And the ten horns which thou sawest are ten kings, which have received no kingdom as yet; but receive power as kings one hour with the beast.”

The idea of a small group of people ruling the world is entirely what the NWO is about, so it’s no wonder that this is seen as a direct prediction of a new world order. And if you study a prediction enough, you’ll start to see it everywhere. The problem, of course, is that nobody can actually agree on where it’s happening.

There are those who think that the Club of Rome is the seat of the NWO, because they published a paper in 1973 that recommended splitting the world into 10 regions. If you crawl even deeper into the fog, you find others touting the G8 as the group of 10 kings from Revelation. Put that calculator away—there are only eight world leaders in the G8, but proponents of the theory predict that it will one day expand to include 10 core nations, signaling the start of Armageddon and, probably, the end of life as we know it.

9 • Population Control

In order to maintain its iron grip over the world, the NWO would have to trim off some of the excess population. According to conspiracy theorists, that means killing most of the planet and leaving about two billion people to continue the human race. These survivors would obviously be the best of the best—scientists, engineers, writers, and politicians—and they would live underground in cities connected by maglev trains. Alternatively, they’ll use alien technology to build bases on the Moon.

Exactly how the New World Order will trim down the population is a point of contention among theorists. Some people believe that a virus bioengineered by the NWO will wipe out the majority of the population, while others hold firm that Obamacare is slowly poisoning people with vaccines. Other purported methods range from devastating drone strikes to educating people about abortion.

8 • Silent Sound Spread Spectrum

One big theory about the NWO is that they use mind control on the general population. While that’s a constant in almost every conspiracy theory, NWO believers think that, when the time comes, the world leaders will flip a switch and instantly force the population into submission. If such a technology were that important to achieving their totalitarian goals, they would obviously try to test it first.

Silent sound spread spectrum (SSSS) is the term most commonly used, although it’s also called “voice to skull” (V2K) technology. It’s almost a cliche these days when a person complains that the government is putting voices in their heads, but they’re still popping up all over the place. One example that’s always repeated on conspiracy theory websites is that the US military used SSSS on Iraqi soldiers, causing them to surrender immediately.

The idea of setting up a system to send microwave signals into the mind of every American—not to mention the rest of the world—is ludicrous at best, but this theory is a cornerstone of the New World Order curriculum.

7 • Blueprints In Literature

In 1928, H.G. Wells published a book called The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution. In the book, he lays out a recipe for establishing a new world order that will last for generations, all of which will be run by the “Atlantic” elite. In 1940, he followed it up with the aptly named The New World Order.

Most people are familiar with H.G. Wells from books like The Time Machine and War of the Worlds, but his guidelines for the New World Order were anything but fiction. As an outspoken socialist, he believed that a world government was inevitable and that widespread eugenics was the proper course for humanity.

True to form, conspiracy theorists are quick to assume that his NWO literature is “required reading” for the world elite. They see it not necessarily as a prediction but as the impetus that brought the “current” New World Order into existence in the first place.

6 • Majestic 12

The conspiracy theory of the Majestic 12 goes something like this: In the 1940s, President Truman commissioned a secret committee of scientists and government employees to keep track of the UFOs that were plaguing America’s skies. The organization, Majestic 12, was kept top secret, but over the years, various documents have surfaced that seem to “prove” their existence.

That’s not what this is about.

According to conspiracy theorists, the government created the entire thing as a hoax in order to keep the public’s attention away from the real threat: aliens in the government. The NWO isn’t headed by the elite of humanity, per se—it’s being planned by aliens who already have humanity’s elite under their control. Majestic 12 is a convoluted mess of a conspiracy within a conspiracy, and while we’re all concerned about it, the aliens have been propelling human look-alikes to powerful government positions and giving us AIDS.

The claim: Jim Creek, Oso, ?What it really is: The Jim Creek Naval Radio Station is a Navy very low frequency (VLF) radio transmitter facility. The facility has one building, and the area itself is also used as a outdoor recreational area for Naval personnel and their families and guests.

The claim: Keyport, ?What it really is: The Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Keyport is one of two of the Navy’s undersea warfare facilities, and employs around 1,300 civilian workers.

The base also has it’s own museum, and while there are several large buildings there, none of them appear to be something you would find in a prison camp. Infact they look mostly like industrial buildings.

The facility itself is surround by the city of Brenton, and there is very little room for where it can expand into, and most of the buildings that are there are nothing you wouldn’t find in a facility such as this.

The claim: Everett, ?What it really is: Naval Station Everett is a relatively young Navy base (it became active in 1994) and is the home to several ships, including the USS Nimitz.

The base itself isn’t actually on to much land, and none of the buildings there look like nothing you wouldn’t find on your typical Navy base. Plus, if there was a prison camp being built there it would be unlikely it could be kept out of public view due to the fact that the city Everett is right next to the base.

Everyone loves a juicy conspiracy theory. Were the moon landings faked? Was Di’s death really an accident? Was there a second gunman on the grassy knoll? Are the royal family actually lizards?

Oh come on, don’t pretend none of these have crossed your mind.

David Runciman

They’ve all crossed David Runciman’s mind. Yes, even that one. Why? Because the politics professor is deep into a five-year project to work out where, when, how and why conspiracy theories fester – and looking in particular at the link between conspiracy and democracy.

“These days when people have conspiracy theories, they tend to think their government is behind it,” explains David. “A classic modern example is 9/11. There are conspiracy theorists who believe that either the American government knew it was going to happen and didn’t tell anyone, or organised it as an excuse to have war in Iraq; they say it’s about oil – all this kind of stuff.” Yet 100 years ago, people were perhaps more likely to blame, say, secret organisations or the banks if anything went wrong, “so we’re interested in trying to understand why people now think that government is the villain.

“We think it’s got something to do with frustrations with democracy: people thinking ‘Why isn’t the world working out the way we want it to? Government must be to blame!’”

Some even go a step further, claiming that there’s a ‘New World Order’: an international government run by the mysterious Bilderberg Group. “People believe that about 100 financiers and government representatives meet in secret, and decide what’s going to happen in the future,” he explains. “There’s a guy in America – a wealthy guy, who’s funding political candidates – who believes that the financial crash of 2008 was engineered in order to get Obama into the White House. They think that they’re manipulating the whole world.”

But why would anyone believe that? “Some people would say ‘Because they’re crazy, they’re paranoid, deluded’. But it’s not just that; it’s partly because they want an explanation for why things keep going wrong.

“There’s this thing: ‘Is history a cock-up or is it a conspiracy?’ And the real explanation is probably it’s a cock-up. Why have we been living through a financial crisis? Probably because people messed up! But conspiracy theorists don’t think that’s a good enough explanation. They think somebody must be behind it.”

And, adds David, there may occasionally be method in their madness: “It’s easy to say conspiracy theorists are people who have lost out in some way, but it’s so widespread! We’re looking at it through history, and it’s not just the ‘losers’, there are lots of different kinds of people who believe in these conspiracies. We want to know why.”

Is Bruno Mars a secret member of the Illuminati? Let’s look at the evidence.

In the “yes, he is” column, we have the fact that Mr. Mars headlined the 2014 Super Bowl Halftime show, which as everyone knows is a showcase for Illuminati members and their teachings, i.e. most of the celebrities. That’s convincing enough, so we’re not even going to bother to look at the arguments against the obvious conclusion that Mars’s performance was full of proof.

The story claimed NFL officials “just found clues that might prove the game was rigged. Officials believe the Broncos intentionally lost the championship in exchange for a large amount of money.” The fake report goes on to say that Super Bowl referee Terry McAulay overheard Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning asking Seahawks coach Pete Carroll, “When are you going to pay up?”

But there is no actual evidence that the game was fixed or rigged. If you scroll further down in the article, Huzlers identifies itself as “a combination of real shocking news and satire news to keep its visitors in a state of disbelief.”

The Super Bowl-is-rigged story falls into the satire category. There are no other reports suggesting that Super Bowl XLVIII, the first time the big game was played outdoors in a cold-weather city, was fixed.

But conspiracy theorists were out in full force trying to prove that the 2014 Super Bowl was staged. Yahoo user . . .

Recently the old FEMA camp myth has once again reared it’s ugly head around internet, this time making it appear that President Obama has ordered $1,000,000,000 worth of “disposable coffins”, as you can clearly see from this screen shot below:

Now I’ve had a lot of videos on here that were just great, and today I’ve decided to have a look back at what I consider to be the five best videos of the week for 2013:

5. Alex Jones As Alien Lizard Explains Obamacare

Probably every skeptic around the world knows who Alex Jones. While many skeptic bloggers have at least written up a couple of articles to either discredit him and/or show what kind of a fool he is, still by far the best person to discredit Alex Jones and to make him look like a fool… is Alex Jones.

From late 2012 to early 2013 Myles Power created a seven part series that is in my opinion one of the best 9/11 conspiracy theory debunking videos that I have ever seen, and the sixth video in the series, which explains the psychology and mindset of a 9/11 Truther, and infact most conspiracy theorists, could have itself been a stand alone video apart from the series.

The Internet is full of diabolical conspiracy theories. One of the most enduring is the existence of 800 plus Federal Emergency Management Agency prison camps, scattered across the country, awaiting the arrival of the New World Order. This theory is sadly ironic since the FEMA’s mission is to help citizens during natural disasters.

YouTube lists dozens of related videos purporting to show these camps. One video is represented as a FEMA concentration camp in Ohio, complete with a crematorium. The narrator states it is near a major metropolitan area, but he inexplicably fails to give the exact location. One particularly outrageous rumor tells of a FEMA camp in Alaska large enough to hold 2 million prisoners. This is about three times the population of Alaska.

A related conspiracy theory is about colored adhesive stickers placed on residential mailboxes. The color is all-important. Upon the arrival of unspecified foreign troops to enforce the New World Order, the color of the sticker would determine the treatment of the occupants of the home. Red means that the occupants of the home are opponents of the government and will be shot immediately. Blue means the occupants have similar beliefs as the red group, but are not nearly as dangerous. They will be sent to a FEMA concentration camp. A yellow sticker means that the occupants would welcome the New World Order and the accompanying socialism.

The question remains as to the real source of the mailbox stickers. The truth is they are used by service people as a convenient method of customer identification.

You know how the world occasionally seems to pick a celebrity to project all its insecurities and collective insanity onto? Stanley Kubrick was that guy on steroids. Ever since his death in 1999, conspiracy theorists have been working overtime to implicate the portly genius in all sorts of shady shenanigans. We’ve already told you about the guys who think Kubrick faked the moon landings and hid clues in his film The Shining. Little did we know that was just the tip of the world’s craziest iceberg.

10 • His Films Are Warnings About A NASA Sex Cult

If you’ve never heard of the Saturn Death Cult, prepare to have your mind blown. A sort of hyper-evil Illuminati crossed with whatever it is David Icke keeps going on about, they’ve infiltrated every organization on Earth to prepare us for the next stage in interstellar evolution—an evolution they intend to bring about by having sex with lots of children. Sound insane? Well get this: Stanley Kubrick supposedly spent his entire life warning us about them.

The theory goes that while faking the moon-landings for NASA, Kubrick became aware of the fiendish, Saturn-worshipping sex cult at the heart of America’s space race. He then set about littering his films with coded warnings alerting us to their existence. 2001: A Space Odyssey was supposed to contain references to the planet Saturn before Warner Bros changed it to Jupiter; Eyes Wide Shut deals with an evil, worldwide sex-cult; AI was originally about the “sort of person” who would want to buy a non-aging, 12-year-old robot boy slave; Lolita warns us about the existence of a child-grooming network.

Sure, that last one was released years before Kubrick allegedly became aware of all this, but why bother with stuff like chronology when we’ve got a salacious cult on our hands?

9 • The Shining Is About Abandoning The Gold Standard

The film Room 237 recently made waves by exposing a whole host of the crazy conspiracy theories focused around The Shining. But there were a couple of theories too insane even for a documentary about insanity. Our favorite is the theory that the entire film is a secret mockery of Woodrow Wilson for abandoning the gold standard.

Let’s back up and look at the clues. Several of The Shining’s key scenes are set in something called “the Gold Room.” In one such scene, Jack Nicholson tries to buy a drink from the bartender, only to be told his money is no good and it’s “orders from the house.” Colonel Edward Mandell House is the man who convinced Woodrow Wilson to drop the standard and make American money worthless. But wait, how do we know Jack is meant to represent Wilson? Simple: Jack has terrible typing skills and in 1913 the New York Times mocked Wilson for that very same defect.

But the real kicker comes in the film’s final shot. In a photograph dated July 4th, 1921, we see Jack Nicholson surrounded by people waving at the camera. July 4th, 1921 also happens to be exactly two months after Wilson retired, and the guy standing behind Jack in the photo looks just like Wilson (sort of, if you squint). There you have it: final proof that the Shining is really a satire on economics.

8 • 2001: A Space Odyssey Proves The Existence Of Aliens

For a film ostensibly about aliens influencing mankind’s development, 2001: A Space Odyssey doesn’t actually have much in the way of space creatures. But that hasn’t stopped some people from seeing it for what it really is. Far from being a seminal sci-fi masterpiece, 2001 is secretly proof of the existence of extra-terrestrials.

This particular theory is an offshoot of the “Kubrick faked the moon landings” one. Starting with the premise that Neil Armstrong was really bouncing around a soundstage somewhere, it asks why a great director might fake one of the most important events in history and comes up with a suitably bizarre answer—aliens beat us to it.

That’s right, the moon landings were really a reconnaissance trip to find evidence of alien tech, hence the need for a fake “public” version. We know Kubrick knew about this because 2001 is chock full of hidden references to alien abductions. The hyper-60s LSD trip taken through the monolith at the end is really a metaphor for people being kidnapped by space aliens, taken from government files which were still top secret at the time. Somehow (while faking the moon landings, no doubt) Kubrick got hold of these files and placed the experiences in 2001 as a “big reveal” for mankind. And we all thought it was just a revolutionary blockbuster.

7 • His Final Film Was Re-edited By Evil Cultists

When Kubrick died in 1999, he’d only just finished editing his final film. Released after his death, Eyes Wide Shut has gained a reputation as the “unfinished” Kurbrick film, despite its creator hanging on just long enough to oversee the final cut. Or at least he would have, if occult New World Order types in league with Warner Bros hadn’t secretly re-edited it after his death.

Yep: The slightly perplexing/disappointing film we saw at the cinema wasn’t Kubrick’s original cut. In scenes that Warner Bros now refuses to release, the director apparently expounded at some length on the existence of real messed-up cults just like the one in the film. To protect the nefarious leaders of these cults, Warner Bros quietly had the picture re-edited—and now denies this ever happened.

But what sort of crazy cult could wield its power like that? What sort of insane organization would be so precious over a simple movie? We’re glad you asked:

6 • Eyes Wide Shut Is About Scientology

We’re going to go out on a limb here and guess you’ve heard of Scientology. Hollywood’s biggest “religion” is everything a creepy cult should be: secretive, convicted of international fraud, and seemingly fronted by Tom Cruise. The same Tom Cruise who just happened to be the star of Kubrick’s final film.

Thanks to this Cruise connection, a lot of people are convinced that Eyes Wide Shut is really a thinly-veiled warning about Scientology. Aside from the film featuring a shady society of no-good rich types, there’s the fact that Kubrick himself had a personal interest in the cult—his daughter Vivian vanished into its clutches in 1998 and hasn’t spoken to her family since. In a long article on the subject, critic Laurent Vachaud has even gone so far as to say everything that happens in the film is a metaphor for Kubrick losing his daughter, right up to the apparent kidnapping of Tom Cruise’s daughter at the end of the film.

Unfortunately, the claims don’t stand up to much scrutiny. Vivian didn’t abandon her family until Eyes Wide Shut was already underway, far too late for major rewrites. Even then she was still in contact: Kubrick wanted her to write the score and she only dropped out at the very last second. It’s an interesting little theory, but a theory is definitely all it is.

Step 1: Start with the premise that any tragic incident is a massive, intricate government conspiracy.

Step 2: Denounce any information presented by a mainstream, non-conspiracy source that directly counters the predetermined conspiracy narrative as corrupt and part of the conspiracy.

Step 3: Monitor these same mainstream sources for information that supports the predetermined conspiracy narrative, even if only remotely. Mainstream media reporting mistakes that support your conspiracy (or any conspiracy really) must be treated as rare moments of truth, glimpses inside the Matrix. Any mainstream media reports in favor of the conspiracy should be treated like the word of God. Spam that information everywhere.

Step 4: Imagination is the same thing as undeniable fact. There is nothing wrong with manipulating Youtube videos and using Photoshop to edit information to make it more obvious for the stupid sheeple to understand.

Step 5: Reject the skeptics to the conspiracy theories aggressively. Call them out for being sheep, shills, Cointelpro, paid agents, et cetera. Do not ever doubt yourself, because if you think they are any of these nouns, then it is undeniably true. After all, the conspiracy theory you are trying to wake the world up to is a fact. Only a sheep would think otherwise.

Step 6: Bring up the founding of the Federal Reserve, the Bay of Pigs, The Gulf of Tonkin, and other well known deceptive schemes by the government often (every conversation if need be.) These actions were confessed by government, therefore every other conspiracy theory is true!

Step 7: Cite declassified documents often, as they are invaluable. If the government reports that a secret program was started and ended 60 years ago- DO NOT BELIEVE THEM. The secret programs for sure are still occurring and are now more massive, sinister, and successful than before.

Step 8: Remember that most of witnesses and victims involved in conspiracy event are actors. Medical examiners, emergency responders, the police, reporters, they are almost all in on it. The innocent people caught up in the conspiracy were either killed or have been threatened by the conspirators and are too afraid to come forward (or they possibly never existed to begin with.)

Step 9: Blitz the world with the truth until everyone deletes you on Facebook or you are banned from your favorite web sites. Lay low for a period, regroup at your favorite alternative web sites, get encouragement and reinforcement from the other awakened truth seekers, and start the process all over again with a new conspiracy.

As the year 2013 comes to a close, it seems only appropriate that we take a look back at some of the wisdom and predictions heaped upon us just 12 months ago by one of this country’s leading intellectuals – little Mikey Adams from Natural News – and see how accurate this wizard of wonder (As in, “I wonder why people believe anything he says.”) was with foretelling the events of 2013.

So, failure #1: he failed to predict his own humiliation when his 2013 predictions would prove to be so devastatingly wrong that he’s forced to remove his own predictions page from his own website.

Failure #2: he failed to predict somebody like me would save a PDF copy of his predictions – just to amuse the world at his expense. (Note: It has since come to my attention that a copy of his predictions can still be found at that other loon site, prisonplanet.com)

I’ll let the good people at Skeptic Project handle the other failures, below.

Who is old enough to remember Y2K? I remember it well (translation: i’m old).

Y2K is an acronym for “Year 2000,” or, as it was also known – “The Year 2000 problem, the Y2K problem, the Millennium bug, the Y2K bug, or simply Y2K.” (source) It was the moment when the clocks struck 12:00 AM on Janury 1, 2000 and how it might affect every aspect of our lives. Why?

The year 2000 was a problem for many computers because many computer programs stored years using only the last two digits of the year; for example, 1980 was stored as “80”, the year 1999 was stored as “99” and the year 2000 would be stored as “00”.

Do you see the problem? Not only did such systems view the year 2000 as “00”, but they also viewed the year 1900 as “00”. Imagine what would happen to half your programs if your computer suddenly thought the current year (2013) was actually the year 1913. Your calendar program, your watch, your smart phone and many other programs we rely on would suddenly be all wacked out. Imagine what would happen to the banking system if this glitch occurred. Would you be able to access your money? Would all your checks suddenly bounce? (On the other hand, maybe the banks would suddenly give us 100 years of accrued interest. But i digress …)

Now imagine if such a glitch were to occur in bigger systems like nuclear electric plants and nuclear weapons? What might go wrong? This is what had a lot of people in a near state of panic.

Would telephone systems shutdown? Would the electric grid turn off across the country – plunging all of us into darkness for an indeterminant amount of time? Would trains run on schedule? Would the air traffic control system lose control? Would our nuclear arsenal behave in some unpredicted manner and cause WWIII? Would the nuclear arsenal in some other country malfunction and bomb us?

It seemed nobody knew for sure what would – or would not – happen. People were concerned and scared.

Enter my favorite moron – Alex Jones.

On New Year’s Eve 1999, the night the clocks were due to change over to the year 2000, The Alex Jones show engaged in some of the most negligent, egregious and irresponsible scare mongering ever. I don’t know of a worse case than this.

In the 3 hours Jones was on the air, he made every conceivable claim of catastrophe imaginable. He took everything people were fearing about Y2K and he claimed those fears were materializing. Everything from cash machines failing, nuclear power plants shutting down, concentration camps (with shackles) being readied, empty grocery store shelves, gas stations out of gas, Martial Law declared, the military serving search warrants in 77 Texas counties – to an actual nuclear missile attack!!!!!!!!

And did any of this actually occur? No. None of it. People were so frightened they reportedly headed for the hills (literally) and got physically sick.

Bill Cooper’s original broadcast was 3 hours long. In the Alex Jones recording i present below, except for the opening 30 seconds, i have edited out all of Bill Cooper’s narratives so you can hear Alex Jones uninterrupted in all his despicable glory.

As i was going through the audio, i noticed breaks in the Alex Jones audio that i assume were done by Bill Cooper’s editing team in preparation for broadcast. Where ever i believed there was an edit i added a half-second “beep” sound. This is to help avoid confusion as the conversation would sometimes abruptly change topics. So listen for the beeps (you can’t miss them).

Below the audio you will find a complete transcript of notes i made of what to expect in the audio. This will help you follow along. Where ever you see the word “Regurgitation,” that is my own shorthand to indicate it is a previously mentioned point being repeated by Jones – a tactic he uses to give the impression he has a pile of information. Any words [inside brackets] are commentaries i made for myself.

Believe me, this is an audio clip Alex Jones wishes would go away.

Enjoy!

:)

Mason I. Bilderberg.

P.S. If anybody knows where i can find a copy of the full 3 hour Alex Jones Show from 12/31/1999 please let me know.

1:39 Pennsylvania nuclear plant (Limerick Generating Station) has been shut down [implied because of Y2K-related problems. Not true. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) findings are contained in the image, below]

1:49 The shelves (In TX) are empty of water and gas stations are running out of fuel

3:12 The government in Washington D.C. has set up a $50M command bunker that is hooked into FEMA and they can take over all the shortwave (radio), AM/FM radio stations and all television and other broadcast stations

3:34 The police and military [presumably nationwide] are on high alert

3:41 The military are highly visible [presumably in the streets]

3:45 Trains of military equipment moving into Austin, TX

3:53 The airport (Robert Mueller Airport) will be used as a massive holding facility [ala concentration camps]

6:00 They (Russia) have deployed their missiles and submarines against us (America).

6:09 Vladimir Putin, who just took over as Russian President, has “taken the codes off” Russia’s nuclear arsenal. (The Russian nuclear arsenal no longer requires a secret code to initiate a nuclear missile attack on America.)

6:25 Discussing America being hit with a nuclear first-strike and the ensuing annihilation.

7:27 Regurgitation: Pennsylvania Electric Company (PECO), Limerick Generating Station (here and here) was shutdown [presumably because of Y2K-related problems. Not true. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) findings are contained in the image, below].

7:38 Doesn’t challenge a caller paraphrasing (Colonel) Bo Gritz who said, that Russia said, if their (Russia) power goes out they will blame us and they (Russia) would set off their nuclear arsenal.

8:01 The Russians are threatening to nuke us every, single week.

8:25 Currencies around the world are plunging

8:39 Gas stations in America are out of gas

8:58 American’s are standing up as Russia threatens to attack us with nuclear weapons

9:02 Nuclear power plants are being shutdown

9:07 The military is “running around” with the police and the FBI saying terrorism is imminent [the takeover is beginning]

9:25 “They” have activated a powerful, cold war, radar system in the north pole region [presumably to keep an eye out for a Russian ICBM attack] that is affecting shortwave (radio)

9:46 Military traffic is EVERYWHERE

9:52 Regurgitation: Super power, cold war radar systems (presumably to keep an eye out for a Russian ICBM attack) and nuclear systems are up.

10:07 Fresno (California?) is blacked out, he (Jones) is off the internet

10:25 [Scare tactic, Survivalist Commercial]

11:03 “America is under siege right now.”

11:14 Regurgitation: Pennsylvania nuclear power plant shutdown

11:33 Egypt is having a run on the banks

11:45 Regurgitation: The power in Fresno (California?) is down, he is off the internet

11:50 Regurgitation: Cash machines and ATMs in Europe are having problems

12:03 Martial Law signs are posted on highway 65 in Arkansas by the Arkansas Transportation Department

21:18 There are “shackles on the ground, concreted into the ground” at Robert Mueller Airport – like a slave galley.

21:42 New Zealand is having power outages

21:57 Regurgitation: Pennsylvania nuclear power plant shutdown

22:33 Regurgitation: Vladimir Putin threatens to nuke us

22:50 Regurgitation: Pennsylvania nuclear power plant shutdown

22:55 The power is off in 8 different areas across the country

22:58 A lot of cable systems aren’t working

23:01 Satellites are down

23:09 “Minor fault (???) struck two nuclear power plants in Japan just seconds after the clock ticked into 2000 …”

23:25 Anybody near a nuclear power plant should pack up and go someplace else.

23:37 The store shelves are bare in Austin, TX.

23:43 Regurgitation: Gas is running out.

23:44 They’re announcing on the news that, “if you’re bad they’re going to put you in a … they’re going to bolt you to a pipe coming out of the ground at the airport (Robert Mueller Airport) in some cold hangar.”

24:04 “The military is serving search warrants now in 77 Texas counties.”

24:08 Regurgitation: “We got nuclear power plants shutting down.”

24:20 Regurgitation: The Russians are threatening to nuke us RIGHT NOW.

28:36 Regurgitation: It’s on ABC news that 5 nuclear missiles have been launched.

28:57 The night before (12/30/99), anything and everything on the flight line at Selfridge Air National Guard Base was put into the air and was constantly in the air. [i.e. The U.S. is preparing for a nuclear attack]

29:11 Regurgitation: Super power, cold war radar systems [presumably to keep an eye out for a Russian ICBM attack] are turned on.

29:21 The Russians are not the only ones we need to be concerned about … we should worry about the Chinese too.

20:24 We also need to be worried about Germany.

29:58 Regurgitation: It’s on ABC news that 5 nuclear missiles have been launched.

Conspiracy theories (CTs) can take many forms and vary widely in popularity, the intensity with which they are believed and their effects on individual and collective behavior. An integrated account of CTs thus needs to explain how they come to appeal to potential believers, how they spread from one person to the next via communication, and how they motivate collective action. We summarize these aspects under the labels of stick, spread, and action. We propose the quasi-religious hypothesis for CTs: drawing on cognitive science of religion, social representations theory, and frame theory. We use cognitive science of religion to describe the main features of the content of CTs that explain how they come to stick: CTs are quasi-religious representations in that their contents, forms and functions parallel those found in beliefs of institutionalized religions. However, CTs are quasi-religious in that CTs and the communities that support them, lack many of the institutional features of organized religions. We use social representations theory to explain how CTs spread as devices for making sense of sudden events that threaten existing worldviews. CTs allow laypersons to interpret such events by relating them to common sense, thereby defusing some of the anxiety that those events generate. We use frame theory to explain how some, but not all CTs mobilize collective counter-conspiratorial action by identifying a target and by proposing credible and concrete rationales for action. We specify our integrated account in 13 propositions.

Introduction

Sigmund Freud

[…] our present purpose is not to debunk yet another CT, but to theoretically elucidate their dynamics and inner logic. Like Freud (1914) considered slips of the tongue as openings to the unconscious mind, Norman (1981) presented action slips as markers of the organization of memory, and Reason (1990) uses errors to gain insights into skilled performance, we consider CTs as occasions to elucidate actual representations of reality as part of human social functioning. Understanding CTs in turn helps us understand the potentially high human costs of over-generalizing agency. Though we need to guard ourselves against creating a conspiracy theory of CTs, our working hypothesis is that CTs have a degree of functional autonomy in modern societies which needs to be understood.

Conspiracy theories have many facets. On the one hand, they constitute cognitive resources that fulfill a need to explain unusual, disturbing events such as disease outbreak, disruptive technology, major scandal, or sudden celebrity death (McCauley and Jacques, 1979; Wagner-Egger et al., 2011). On the other hand, they are narratives that circulate in culture – in mass media, as rumors, in stories (Byford, 2011). These narratives reduce the complexity presented by such events, contain the uncertainty they generate, and translate unspecific anxiety into focused fears (Barrett and Lawson, 2001). CT narratives are also inscribed in the context of antagonistic relations between groups, drawing on recurrent negative views of outgroups to explain events and, sometimes, motivate collective action.

This 56 page document is published by The British Psychological Society and i’ve just begun reading it, so i can’t yet say whether i love it or hate it. But so far i’m liking what i see. It appears to be written in sections – some of which i’ll be skipping – but there looks to be enough great stuff in here to make it worth downloading.

I’m posting an excerpt below for you to read to help you decide whether this is something you might want to peruse.

Special issue: The psychology of conspiracy theories

PRINCESS DIANA was murdered by the British Secret Service because she was pregnant with Dodi Fayed’s baby. The government is adding fluoride to our drinking water in an attempt to weaken the population. Barak Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim and thus ineligible for the Office of the President of the United States.

All of these statements have appeared at some point or other in popular media, debated by politicians, challenged and denied by government departments, and propagated heavily over the internet. A quarter of the UK population believe Diana was assassinated (YouGov, 2012); similarly 25 per cent of Americans think Obama was not born in the US (CBS News/New York Times, 2011). But these statements are not true.

They are examples of a cultural shift in the popularity of the ‘conspiracy theory’; alternative narratives of a world overshadowed by malevolent groups hell-bent on the destruction of civil liberties, freedom and democracy. They suggest that governments, secret religious groups, scientists or private industry (often many of these combined) are responsible for either causing or covering up significant major world events for their own criminal ends.

What is a ‘conspiracy theory’?

[…]

Broadly, psychologists feel that conspiracy theories are worth studying because they demonstrate a particular sub-culture of often heavily political activism that is at odds with the mainstream view. Conspiracy theories are unsubstantiated, less plausible alternatives to the mainstream explanation of an event; they assume everything is intended, with malignity. Crucially, they are also epistemically selfinsulating in their construction and arguments.

[…]

What insight does psychology offer?

Belief systems, cognitive biases and individual differences

But what in particular is it about conspiracy believers that are interesting from a psychological perspective? We find these theories and those who believe them incredibly resilient to counter-argument, driven by an often fanatical belief in their version of the truth, coupled with a heavy political overtone in that their opinions need to be heard. We see an interesting combination of cognitive biases, personality traits and other psychological mechanisms at play in the formation, propagation and belief in conspiracies.

A detail of a mural in Denver International Airport, subject of much conspiracy theorist interest. A plea for peace, or a plan for future martial law?

There is a curious relationship between psychology and the study of conspiracy theories. Historians, philosophers, sociologists and political scientists often present conspiracy theories as being of an essentially psychological nature.

Many such writers describe belief in conspiracies as manifestations of ‘paranoia’, ‘anxiety’, ‘fantasy’, ‘hysteria’ and ‘projection’, or as fulfilling a profound psychological need for certainty in the precarious (post-)modern age. In everyday discourse too, ‘conspiracy theorists’ are often labelled ‘lunatics’, ‘kooks’ or ‘paranoiacs’, implying that they suffer from some intrinsic psychological deficiency or dysfunction.

Yet, surprisingly, little psychological research has been conducted on this topic. In fact, it is only since the 1990s that social psychologists have turned their attention to the conspiracy theory phenomenon and scrutinised its psychological roots in a systematic way.

Investigating the conspiracy theorist

Much psychology research has focused on identifying factors which predispose certain individuals to endorse conspiracy theories. Given that not everyone believes in conspiracy theories, psychological studies have sought to uncover what distinguishes believers from non-believers, and in so doing create a “psychological profile” of conspiracist individuals.

Researchers have explored the relevance of more general demographic factors like gender, socio-economic status, educational level or ethnic background and so on, but also things like disenchantment with political authority, sense of powerlessness, political cynicism, authoritarianism or alienation from society.

They have also looked at personality factors and aspects of cognitive functioning (resistance to disconfirming evidence, tendency to circular thinking, attributional styles, etc.) to see whether conspiracism is underpinned by some intrinsic perceptual or reasoning deficit which leads people to misunderstand or misinterpret causal relations in the world.

Overall, this quest for the psychological profile of conspiracy theorists has yielded modest results. Conspiracy theorists have been shown to be quite similar to sceptics in terms of cognitive functioning or personality. In fact, the only consistent finding is that believers tend to be disenchanted with authority and cynical about the mainstream of politics.

But this is hardly surprising: these are the central motifs of any conspiracy theory!

Look again…

One possible reason why the psychology of conspiracy theories produced so few meaningful results is that researchers have been approaching this phenomenon in the wrong way. They have tended to see conspiracy theories first and foremost as individual beliefs, thereby reducing them to events that are going on inside a person’s mind (information processing biases, personality characteristics, etc.).

But conspiracy theories are not just a set of individual attitudes.

Did you hear about…?

Anyone who has had the opportunity to engage with conspiracy theories will realise that they are, in fact, a dynamic set of stories and shared assumptions about the world which persist and evolve over time. As such, they are continuously exchanged, debated, evaluated and modified as people try to make sense of the world and events around them.

There are a lot of accusations leveled against the Illuminati, and out of all of those accusations I’ve noticed many things and traits about the group.

Now out of all of the things and traits that I have noticed about the Illuminati I’ve narrowed it down to five distinct things.

So here are five things that I’ve noticed about the Illuminati:

5 • They are the most patient people in the world.

The Illuminati has to be composed of some of the most patient people in the world. I say this because according to people who “investigate” the Illuminati (i.e. people who spend most of their free time watching or creating Youtube videos about the Illuminati, and listening to Alex Jones) have been doing stuff for years in order to get ready to take over the world, as well as kill 80%-90% of the population, and enslave everyone else.

Now as to how long the Illuminati have been plotting to take over the Earth no one (and by “no one” I mean conspiracy theorists) is really sure because no one is really sure how old the Illuminati is. Most conspiracy theorists say they’re around two and a half centuries old, although others say they’re as old as civilization, or even older, while others say they’re only about a century or so old.

Regardless of how old the Illuminati is, the fact that they have been allegedly at this taking over the world thing for a very long time clearly shows that they are composed of the world’s most patient individuals… or the world’s worst procrastinators.

Now I would think that there would be atleast a few people in the Illuminati who wants to really push forward in taking over the world. I say this because apparently the Illuminati has a huge membership, so I would think that there would be atleast a few ambitious individuals amongst themselves.

Infact when thinking about that huge membership of their’s it almost seems like that…

4 • Everyone is a part of the Illuminati.

According to conspiracy theorists there are a huge amount people (probably in the tens of millions) who are members, or atleast works for, the Illuminati. This alleged list includes actors, musicians (actually any celebrity really), rich people, politicians, high ranking military officers, anyone in the CIA, or FBI, or NSA, whistleblowers, religious leaders, myself and fellow skeptics, and even other conspiracy theorists. Heck, even Alex Jones whom constantly “speaks out” against the Illuminate has himself been accused of being a member of the Illuminati.

Now taking all of this “information” (a.k.a. accusations) into account by my estimates I believe there are only eight people in the world are not apart of the Illuminati…

I admit I might be a little off on my math there, but still that’s an awful lot of people who are apart of this super secret organization (so secret that there is no real proof of it’s existence).

Of course when you also consider how many people who are apart of this alleged secret organization it shouldn’t also be surprising to know that…

3 • They control everything.

According to many conspiracy theorists the Illuminati controls everything from the media, to the military, to the manufacturing industries, the airline industry (because how else are they going to spray chemtrails), the entertainment industry, the UN, the European Union, the Free Masons, the US government, law enforcement, major religions, minor religious, cults, the Democrats, the Republicans, the banks, most other governments, the oil industry, the pharmaceutical industry… the list just keeps going on and on.

So is Bill Gates really a Monsanto-owning, eugenics-loving, anti-education monster who wants to cull the population through poisoned vaccines? Or is he a wealthy man trying to use his fortune do some good in the world in a way that angers people who see conspiracy around every corner?

First of all, let’s sweep away any speculation that supporting vaccination is a bad thing. Despite one’s personal opinion, vaccines save lives. Mommy instinct and Google University might not agree with that, but decades of scientific research does.

Vaccination in the developing world makes up a major platform of the Gates Foundation’s philanthropy. Populations that had no access to vaccines for a host of deadly, preventable illnesses now do. The Foundation’s efforts are working. In just one example, India, a country ravaged by polio not that long ago, reported one single case in 2011.

It’s the polio vaccine that makes up one of the most common claims against the Foundation, that Gates-sponsored vaccines caused 47,500 cases of paralysis in India. You’ll find this claim all over vaccine-doomsayer websites, and as you can guess, it’s not true. The polio vaccine does not cause polio. These cases turned out to be acute flaccid paralysis, caused by a non-polio enterovirus. Another oft-repeated and equally bogus claim is that Malawian children were forced at gunpoint to take Gates vaccines. The source of this is, of course, Natural News – which referenced an article from Malawi Voice that appears to have been taken down shortly after it went up.

Skeptical Raptor has a good write-up of these and other false vaccine-related accusations against the Gates Foundation. Read it, then beat your head against the nearest wall.

CLAIM: Bill Gates is a eugenics advocate who wants to cull the world’s population.

Did the richest man in the world calmly (and publicly) outline his plans for genocide?

Conspiracy theories about global depopulation are legion, with everyone from the UN to the Illuminati supposedly preparing a massive thinning of the herd through “soft kill” techniques. So naturally, a Bill Gates speech about how vaccines can reduce the population of the world would be a big deal and prove him to be a murderous monster.

Of course, Gates never said such a thing.

What Gates DID do was give a TED talk in 2010, called “Innovating to Zero.” The focus of the talk was reducing global carbon emissions to, as per the title, zero. Out of that speech came this quote, which conspiracy mongers have seized on as an admission that Gates is a eugenicist in programmer’s clothing:

The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about nine billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by, perhaps, 10 or 15 percent, but there we see an increase of about 1.3.

Devoid of context, it looks like he’s saying that vaccines and health care could kill a billion people. But a rational person doesn’t look at this and see the richest man in the world calmly (and publicly) outlining his plans for genocide. What Gates is talking about is reducing population growth, and reputable science bears out that a higher-standard of living equals lower birth rates. Included in this are things like good health care, better food and, yes, vaccines.

Like all the other depopulation plans, this one appears to be either not real or moving incredibly slowly.

“There are certain subjects which are prevented or we simply proscribe from discussing within the lodge,” Piers Vaughan, master of St. John’s Lodge #1 in New York, told Mo Rocca. “And religion is one. Politics is another.”

One of the world’s leading experts on Freemasonry confirms.

“Do they discuss forms of politics and events that have happened? Yes, they do,” said UCLA history professor Margaret Jacob. “Do they say, ‘Well, I’m a Democrat and therefore I think …’ Or, ‘I’m a Republican … ‘ No, I don’t think they do that.”

2. Freemasonry is not a religion.

“Freemasonry has the look of a religion,” said Jacob. “You think of religion as ritual, there’s also this ritual element. But there are no priests, there are no ministers, there are no rabbis, there’s no system of clergy of any sort. Everybody’s their own thinker.”

From Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, first published in 1872 and regularly reprinted thereafter until 1969, is a book of esoteric philosophy published by the Supreme Council, Thirty Third Degree, of the Scottish Rite, Southern Jurisdiction of the United States. (source)

Jacob said the initial response to Freemasonry in continental Europe, particularly in Catholic Europe, was suspicion from seeing “all these men [from] different neighborhoods, different professions meeting in the cafe, breaking bread together, doing rituals, what could this be? Political conspiracy or religion.”

In 1738 the Catholic Church condemned Freemasonry, and has since issued about 20 decrees — directly or indirectly — against the fraternity. In 1983 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI) re-affirmed this position.

“This is an organization of believers,” he said. “When it was started on a formal basis in 1717, many historians believe that it was trying to bridge the gap between the religious civil wars that had been going on in England at the time. The Catholics would get in power and beat up on the Protestants; the Protestants would get in power and beat up on the Catholics; and everyone was beating up on the Jews.

“So when the Freemasons were formed, [they] said, ‘Here’s a group of men that agree that God is central in their lives, they can even agree that God compels them to do good in the community, then they can shut up after that.” That was a radical concept — that men could get together and agree on that fundamental level, and then get on with their lives.”

So could an atheist join? No, said James Sullivan, Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of New York: “The reason we, I think in the past, wanted somebody that had a belief in a supreme being is because we take certain obligation to be a good man, to support the fraternity. And if you didn’t have a belief in a supreme being, the obligation would mean nothing.”

5. Most of the Founding Fathers were NOT Freemasons.

Two of America’s earliest presidents, George Washington and James Monroe, were Freemasons, as were Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock and Paul Revere. But many leading figures in the American Revolution — including John and Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Thomas Paine — were not Masons.

Of the 56 figures who signed the Declaration of Independence, only nine were confirmed Masons, according to the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania; and of the 39 delegates of the Continental Congress who signed the draft of the new nation’s Constitution in 1787, only 13 (one-third) were Freemasons.

6. There are NO secret Masonic symbols on the U.S. dollar bill.

The back of the collar bill features an incomplete pyramid with an eye on top of it. Many people — including some Freemasons – say it’s a Masonic symbol, but that’s not the case. UCLA’s Margaret Jacob says these symbols have been used by many different groups, including Masons, throughout history.

“I’m sure there are a lot of Freemasons who want to believe [they’re Masonic symbols] and who will tell it to you, because it makes the Lodges seem important,” Jacob said. “I mean, if you have a symbol on the dollar bill, that’s a big deal!”

Brent Morris said there are two types of people who want to promote the idea that the symbols are Masonic: “The pro-Masons and the anti-Masons — and that pretty well covers the universe.

“The Eye of God is a common icon for God looking over the affairs of man,” Morris said. “It’s an icon that appears in cultures across the centuries. The uncompleted pyramid [which also appeared on a 50-pound Colonial note] represented that our country was not yet completed, that we were continuing to grow.”

The persistent high-altitude contrails are more than stripes in the stratosphere. They are the stuff of conspiracy theories on par with Area 51, the Roswell UFO crash and who shot JFK.

The chemtrail conspiracy theory claims that some contrails are chemical, biological or otherwise toxic elements sprayed at high altitudes by government agencies _ of some sort _ for the purpose of _ well, something not good. It’s high-altitude crop dusting for nefarious purposes, the tin-foil hat crowd claims.

“The lifetime and behavior of contrails depend on the environmental conditions in which they form,” Petty writes. “Growing contrails result when the humidity at high altitudes is at or above the saturation point with respect to ice. So when condensation is injected in the atmosphere at those altitudes, the microscopic particles of ice don’t simply evaporate, they persist and even grow, and they are spread by the winds into broader patches of cirrus cloud.”

If persistent contrails are more common, Petty suggests, it is because there is more high-altitude airliner traffic and the stratospheric humidity is higher because of the moisture left by the contrails of all that traffic.

For this article I’m throwing in a bit of a curveball from what you’ve come to expect from iLLumiNuTTi.

This article is not about proving or disproving conspiracies. Whether you or I believe the following conspiratorial claims to be true is irrelevant for the purposes of this article. For the sake of argument, just this once, let’s assume all the insanity is true.

Why? Because this article is going to use the beliefs espoused by the conspiracists themselves to point out a peculiar inconsistency between what conspiracists say and what conspiracists do.

The question to be answered is, “Are conspiracists all talk and no walk?”

Here we go . . .

The Fukushima Fallout Is Here And Is Killing Us

Distributed by conspiracists as proof of radioactive water emanating from Fukushima, this image actually had absolutely nothing to do with radiation.(click the image to find out more)

Conspiracists are screaming and yelling about the radioactive fallout from the Fukushima disaster. They are convinced the radioactive fallout has already reached the west coast and other parts of the United States and is killing us, and “they” (who ever “they” are) are covering up the situation.

The crank site Natural News[1] is telling us about “a multitude of strange animal deaths, high radiation readings and other recent anomalies” on the west coast.

Natural News[2] also tells us even the Alaskan coastline is seeing the effects of deadly radiation with a series of “strange animal deaths … including masses of sea lions, sockeye salmon and other sea creatures washing up on the shore,” and “polar bears, seals and walruses … found to have major fur loss and open sores…”

This picture posted by elitedaily.com[3] claims a nationwide increase in mortality rates since the Fukushima disaster:

The cranks at worldtruth.tv[4] are telling us the entire food supply is contaminated with radiation and recommends we avoid the following foods: seafood, water, dairy products, produce and meat.

Why aren’t conspiracists evacuating the west coast?

If conspiracists truly believed this rhetoric you would expect them to be doing something about it, wouldn’t you?

For example, do we see conspiracists packing up their belongings, getting in their cars and evacuating the west coast to save themselves from imminent doom?

What, exactly, are conspiracists doing in response to a crisis they want the rest of us to believe?

Nothing. They are doing absolutely nothing.

The Bush Family Did Business With The Nazis

Prescott Bush was one of seven directors of the Union Banking Corporation (UBC), an investment bank that operated as a clearing house for many assets and enterprises held by German steel magnate Fritz Thyssen. His involvement with UBC was purely commercial, he was not a Nazi sympathizer. (More)

The basic idea is, because the Bush family had business connections with Nazi Germany[5], we should not only hate the Bush family but the Nazi connection is all the proof needed to prove the Bush family are evil, ruthless people – able, willing, wanting and guilty of killing thousands of people on September 11. 2001.

What do you think? Do conspiracists call these companies evil? Do you think conspiracists refuse to work for any of these companies? Do conspiracists refuse to purchase or use products connected with these companies?

Of course not.

Conspiracists tell us to hate the Bush family because of their business connection to Nazi Germany. They say this as they climb into their Ford, GM, Volkswagen or BMW vehicle and drive away on a tank of gas supplied by one of Standard Oil’s successor companies. Once home, they kick off their Hugo Boss shoes, grab some Nestlé cookies (Mmmmmmm!) from their GE refrigerator and wash it all down with a can of Fanta orange soda.

Peace and love or Nazi deathmobile?

Afterwards they fight the matrix masters by posting conspiratorial crap on their blog using a DSL connection routed through an IBM server.

Then before turning in for the night they head on over to Amazon or Ebay and buy another round of conspiracy DVDs and books – published by Random House – using a Chase bank Visa card.

The next time a conspiracist mentions the Bush-Nazi connection, ask them what kind of car they drive.

Conspiracists believe that some trails left by aircraft are chemical or biological agents deliberately sprayed at high altitudes for purposes undisclosed to the general public and directed by various government officials.[7]

Conspiracists believe the aircraft we see flying across the sky everyday are poisoning us with some kind of nanoparticle spray. Barium and aluminum seem to be the most common elements the conspiracists believe are raining down upon us.

What debilitating health effects do conspiracists believe are befalling us?

So what do you think? If you believed harmful nanoparticles are dropping from the sky causing every conceivable adverse health problem short of stripping the skin off your face, wouldn’t you take steps to protect yourself?

Of course you would.

In real life, to provide adequate protection against the chemicals and biological agents the conspiracists are talking about, a simple surgeon’s mask won’t suffice. You would have to squeeze yourself into a hazmat suit akin to what is depicted in the image to the right.

When is the last time you saw a chemtrail-believing conspiracist walking around in a hazmat suit? Never. Once again, conspiracists don’t behave in a manner consistent with their stated beliefs.

The next time a chemtrail believer screams about those death trails in the sky, comment on how hard it must be to type on a keyboard while wearing those big, bulky hazmat suit gloves.

Government Spying

Conspiracists are an extraodinarily paranoid bunch.

I read a blaring headline the other day, written by a conspiracist, claiming facebook is working hand-in-hand with the NSA to spy on our every move by turning over all our private data, pictures, videos, likes, dislikes, friends list, private messages . . . EVERYTHING! Even our shoe size.

“Where did you read this headline?”, you ask? On facebook – of course. This conspiracist has a facebook timeline brimming with every anti-government rant you could ever imagine. Am I the only one seeing the irony here?

Then there is the conspiracist who sent me an email imploring me to get angry about the NSA spying on our emails. When I pointed out to him that he should encrypt his own emails if his fear was real, he tells me encrypting his emails would just get him flagged by “them.” Excuse me for just a second but – *ahem* *clears throat* – WTF?

Another conspiracist friend refuses to join Facebook because he fears being flagged and tracked by “them.” Yet he runs a blog where he pontificates at great lengths detailing his very own brand of crazy. When I queried him on this seeming contradiction he gave me an explanation that I can honestly say I didn’t understand. It just didn’t make sense – whatever he said.

When a story comes out speculating on the ability of the government to use cell phones to track our movements. Do my conspiratorial friends rid themselves of their cell phones or, at a minimum, wrap their cell phones in foil to prevent the tracking of their phones? Of course not.

Televsions Are For Brainwashing and Mind Control

Conspiracists believe, “that television flicker rates induce alpha brain waves, lulling the brain into a more subconscious state that can be compared to sleep, literally inducing a type of hypnosis within the viewer that makes them more susceptible to suggestion”[10] and “whatever is coming from the TV therefore somewhat bypasses the logical mind and is embedded directly into the subconscious.”[11]

In other words, “they” are using televisions as a “psycho-social weapon[12]” to control our minds and turn us into New World Order (NWO) zombies, instilling us with “a social worldview and value system that is self-centric and is in fact the opposite of what a healthy and enduring society requires.[13]”

Here is my question: If television really is a tool to brainwash and control the mind, wouldn’t the viewing of conspiracy documentaries on a television also have the same mind controlling and brainwashing effect on every conspiracist?

Why don’t conspiracists accuse the makers of their wack-a-doo conspiracy DVDs of brainwashing?

If conspiracists sincerely believed their own hype, they would cease watching all television programs regardless of the content. But they don’t and they won’t.

I think you get the idea.

In order to take a conspiracist to task you needn’t know what they know to counter their arguments, you need only ask them, “What are you doing about your claimed belief?”

I ask this very question of Alex Jones regarding chemtrails. Of all the conspiracists who have the resources to settle the chemtrail debate once and for all, it’s Alex Jones. If Alex Jones really believes “they” have been spraying us for almost 20 years, why doesn’t Alex reach into his own wallet and pull out some of that $$$$$ he earns from DVD sales and rent a plane, pay a pilot, hire a certified forensics lab, fly into the suspicious clouds and contrails, conduct all the necessary air sampling while following all proper chain of custody procedures and end this debate once and for all? Why? Because it would kill those DVD sales.